November 4th, 2008

For the past two months we’ve been working on a new version based on the awesome feedback since the launch of our Smart Menus.  We (Pat, actually!) told many of you that we’d have this release ready by the end of October, and some of you got an early demo of the development version.

Today is Election Day in the United States (as if those of you in the U.S. do not already know that), meaning we missed our rough target date, but the slight delay was well worth it!

The new features completely rock, and I can confidently say that you (and your visitors) are going to love this release.

Briefly, here’s what’s new:

• Visual update (tabs!)
• Digg counts (real-time!)
• Delicious counts (real-time!)
• E-mail made faster/easier
• Prioritize services
• In-widget browser bookmarking instructions (for non-IE browsers)
• More publisher options

Visual refresh

To be perfectly honest, this screenshot doesn’t convey the aesthetic awesomeness of the update.  To fully appreciate the new look of the widget, and that transparent border, take it for a test drive…  try the homepage, or your closest AddToAny widget!

Digg & Delicious counts

The real-time number of diggs appears to the right of the Digg link, and the real-time number of saves on Delicious appears to the right of the Delicious link.  What’s more, if you hover over the Digg link, you can see the exact number of diggs and number of comments on the Digg story page.

E-mail

Based on sharing activity, we know that web users still use e-mail as their primary means of sharing.  (And of course, everyone has an e-mail address!)  So we thought about how we could make sharing via e-mail even easier.

We decided it was crucial to provide direct links to the major web-based e-mail services’ Compose E-mail page, with the shared link information all pre-filled, ready to send.  Users of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Live Hotmail, and AOL Mail will love this.

Alternatively, we still offer a link to our relatively new e-mailer to quickly share using any other e-mail address (or without having to login to one of the above services).

In addition, there’s an option for desktop programs (using the age-old trusty mailto: link).  Same deal, the e-mail is ready to send and share with the link and link title helpfully filled out.

Prioritize services

Many of you have asked about this, and were we hesitant.  We hesitated because our goal is to provide a consistent sharing and saving experience for all users across the web; wherever there’s an AddToAny menu, a user should be able to share and save using any service.

a2a_prioritize is our answer to your requests.  Using this JavaScript variable, you choose services you want prioritized within the menu.  This means that in the default menu, you can choose which services appear at the top of the menu, and the order in which they appear.

In regards to smartly-sorted services, the services you prioritize will also be prioritized within the personalized sorting of services.  We’ll be refining this over the next few weeks.

Browser bookmarking

As before, a visitor using Internet Explorer will see “Add to Favorites” as opposed to a “Bookmark” button, but maybe you remember that ugly alert dialog box?  Well it’s been replaced!  We replaced it with in-widget bookmarking instructions tailored to the user’s browser.

Quick deviated lesson about Firefox: The JavaScript-assisted bookmarking you may have seen elsewhere isn’t what the user wants — those bookmarks, by default, target users’ Firefox sidebar — definitely not what the user wants!

Quick lesson about Opera: They’ve quelled that old pseudo-click hack!

Other changes

• Faster loading
• Smart Menus are smarter
  • The default order of services (by popularity) is preserved to increase the effectiveness of visitor sharing activity
• No JavaScript errors for speed-demons
  • In other words, onmouseover/onmouseout/onclick have been removed from the button code and moved into the main JS
  • You might want to grab the new code to take advantage of this change
  • Official WordPress update soon!
• New checkbox to toggle the menu on-mouse-over or on-click available in More Options on the button generator page
  • Old method will still work fine, but replace the code if you have a chance