Our Blog

A few weeks ago, we shared our plans to upgrade Fluxiom to a brand new platform featuring cutting-edge hardware and industry-leading connectivity. This platform is now live, and the service has never performed better. With plenty of power to spare, we are now poised to introduce a series of significant improvements to our interface, peeling away older code, letting go of compatibility layers, and revealing a livelier, sprightlier Fluxiom!

Because nobody likes disorientating updates, we will introduce these new features progressively over the coming months, starting today with brand-new login, upload, and download pages — new gateways to a new app!

Our fresh new design is crisper and fully responsive, heralding our upcoming transition to a fully mobile interface. It puts your custom brand front and centre and guarantees the fastest possible load times, even on 4G networks. (Can you say iPad Pro on the go?) Whether you are logging into your account or a Stage or even uploading a file to a Fluxiom user’s Inbox, the extra speed and smoother flow will make switching to Fluxiom a breeze.

Improvements to the app’s logic make it easier to navigate traditionally tight corners. For example, you can now log into your account and recover a forgotten password using either your username or your email address. Look for many such small boosts in every corner of the application.

We will share more about our new setup soon, and introduce our exciting new features as they come online. In the meantime, remember the whole team stands ready to answer your questions through in-app chat or email.

Summary

• The new Fluxiom platform is now live
• Improvements are scheduled over the coming weeks
• Key app pages are now faster and better-looking
• Our transition to an all-responsive UI is underway
• Log in using either your email or username

Fluxiom’s quick and easy previews are the best way to drill into large file collections. Today, we are introducing a dramatically simpler and faster way to peek into your photos, videos, and PDFs: gone are the old-school pop-up windows, replaced instead by lightweight in-app overlays.

These overlays offer all the rich functionality you rightly expect from Fluxiom’s desktop-class interface:

1. Press the Space bar to open the preview.
2. Navigate from one file to the next by using your Arrow keys, without closing the previews.
3. Access key file information — such as the name and size of each document — above the previews.
4. Press the space bar to quickly return to your Assets View. Check out all available keyboard-shortcuts.

Quick-action buttons enable you to download each file as you view it, or to transfer it to a pop-up window, so as to compare as many assets as you wish on the screen. (The latter functionality emulates the old previews.)

We no longer enlarge small images when displaying them. Conversely, large files are now carefully downsized and presented in full Retina quality. This ensures that previews always look their best and should greatly facilitate delicate design work.

From a technical standpoint, the new previews use as much native browser functionality as possible, thereby maximizing performance and battery life. (Can you say iPad Pro?) In particular, the video player now uses HTML5 by default (using Flash only as a fallback) and PDF documents are natively embedded.

The new previews are available right now across Fluxiom, including on Stages. We know how central previews are to your workflows and hope you will enjoy this lighter and better-performing version. As always, we eagerly look forward to reading your feedback!

Key points

• Previews are now lighter and faster
• Videos and PDFs now display natively
• You can still pop out assets in separate windows to compare them

Brand-new Macs about to join their many siblings in the data centre. Think integration day, for computers.

Some people ring in the new year with party streamers and silly string. For 2016, we chose nylon ties and CAT6 cables, as the holidays marked the beginning of the largest technology upgrade cycle in the history of Fluxiom. As our clients’ businesses grow in numerous and exciting ways, so does ours. With ever more files on Fluxiom, ever more images on Maiko, and ever more client sites to run, we felt the time had come to step up our game in a big way.

All-new platform

Our commitment to privacy and security runs deep. Our brand-new platform continues to be designed, operated, and maintained in-house using the latest Apple hardware for optimal reliability and efficiency. We never outsource client data to opaque clouds, and take full responsibility for its safekeeping.

Each layer of our stack will now run on multiple dedicated machines, without wasting a drop of power on virtualisation. Hot spares and bespoke deployment recipes will empower us to face the unpredictable, from hardware failures to overnight sensations, by bringing up additional equipment at any time, in a matter of minutes.

These new, turbo-charged servers will run the latest major Ruby and Rails versions. Over the next six months, we will progressively upgrade every app we maintain to the very latest iteration of these fast-moving technologies, enabling us to squeeze every drop of power and reliability from the new hardware.

The new platform is already up and running and undergoing the final tests. We will be moving client services transparently to the new setup over the coming few weeks, as the old platform progressively winds down.

End of support for older browsers

On 12 January 2016, Microsoft stopped supporting older versions of Internet Explorer. While we are not yet ready to take such drastic steps, we will stop supporting IE 7–9 on 1 March 2016.

Older versions of Explorer are not only fundamentally insecure, they also lack support for the modern web technologies we need to introduce new features and interfaces. Supporting these older and marginal browsers means withholding improvements from everybody, which we feel is not an acceptable trade-off.

While we won’t lock out anybody by design, we will stop testing new releases against these browsers. For their own security and peace of mind, we encourage all our customers to upgrade to supported versions of Explorer or cross-grade to browsers like Chrome and Firefox today. Our support team is ready to assist you in this effort.

We remain committed to supporting every platform we can, so long as it does not endanger stability or security. Therefore, we shall continue to support the last two versions of Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on all platforms, as well as Internet Explorer 10 and 11 on Windows.

Summary

• Fluxiom is upgrading all its software and hardware
• The upgrade will be fully transparent to end-users
• Exciting new features will launch in the second half of 2016
• Support for Internet Explorer 7–9 will end on 1 March