> Hello Raplet developers,
> I'd like to share something special with you today.
> *New Rapportive user interface in private beta*
> A while ago we realised that if someone has a Rapportive profile with lots
> of links, and you also have a few Raplets installed, the sidebar gets very
> long. That gets particularly inconvenient on a long conversation thread,
> because you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom in order to see
> the rest of the sidebar — not the nice elegant experience we want Rapportive
> to be. We figured that we had to make better use of the available screen
> space.
> So we've been hard at work to bring a new user interface design to
> Rapportive. It breaks the sidebar down into distinct sections, and for many
> sections we have a small, collapsed version as well as the full expanded
> detail. This means that if screen space is tight, we can display only the
> collapsed summary; if you want to see the expanded section, just hover your
> mouse over it. If you want to see a particular section expanded by default,
> you can just click a button and the expanded information slides into the
> sidebar.
> The new user interface isn't ready for the general public yet: there are
> still plenty of bugs and design issues, and performance in Firefox is awful.
> But since you may want to take it into account when designing your Raplets,
> I'd like to give you priority access to the private beta. :) Although it
> currently doesn't work very well, it is going to get a lot better over the
> coming days/weeks.
> To opt in to the private beta, please go to
> https://rapportive.com/preferences?user_email=...@example.com (replacing
> f...@example.com with the email address of your Gmail/Google Apps account)
> and check the box. You can opt out again at any time. Please don't pass this
> on.
> *Raplet support for new user interface*
> If you want, you can take advantage of the new user interface by providing
> separate expanded and collapsed versions of your Raplet content. We have updated
> the documentation <http://code.rapportive.com/raplet-docs/#advanced_usage>to show you how to use the new features.
> The good news: you're not required to change anything. Your existing Raplet
> should continue working just fine. By default, it will show your content in
> the expanded view, and automatically generate a collapsed view based on your
> Raplet's name and icon. If you encounter any problems, please email the
> raplet-dev <http://groups.google.com/group/raplet-dev> mailing list, at
> raplet-dev@googlegroups.com, and we'll sort it out.
> *Other Raplet API updates*
> We're taking this opportunity to also make a number of minor updates:
> • There is a new field in the Raplet metadata, called small_icon_url. It
> lets you specify a 16x16 pixel icon in addition to the 100x100 pixel icon in
> the icon_url field.
> • Inline <script> and <style> tags in your HTML response have been
> deprecated for a long time, and now we're beginning to strip them out
> entirely. Please put your JavaScript and CSS in the js and css properties
> of your response.
> • The documentation described caching of js and css properties of your
> response, but we never actually implemented it, so we're removing it from
> the docs.
> • For users on the new user interface beta, we cleaned up the CSS
> environment for Raplets. If you were accidentally relying on some of our
> internal CSS rules, your Raplet's look may change. Please make sure that all
> your CSS is specified in the Raplet response's css property.
> • In last month's update we introduced a feature which lets you override
> the default Rapportive profile to show for a conversation (useful if your
> app sends notification emails). This feature now also supports looking up
> profiles by Twitter username, not just by email address.
> If you have any thoughts on the updates, we'd love to hear what you think
> on the raplet-dev <http://groups.google.com/group/raplet-dev> mailing
> list, at raplet-dev@googlegroups.com.
> Cheers,
> Martin
> --
> Martin Kleppmann
> Co-founder, Rapportive
> http://rapportive.com
