Good evening everyone! I’m pretty stoked about finally delivering the v5 update to you guys, although at this point expectations must be so high that I’m getting worried that this will be as cool as you all hope. I’ve been staring at it for months and I still giggle like a school boy when I see some of these new toys Nick has put together, so it can’t be all that bad right?! As we enter the final stretch, Nick is working very hard on the Publishing System, which is getting a huge make-over.

We really feel that the Publishing System, which is the area where members can host their tutorials for free on our site, including image and attachment upload and management, is a very valuable and appreciated tool, but it needed some massaging before it was used more frequently. Well this update will be HUGE for the publishing system, with a ton of new features that will do everything short of writing the tutorials for you. We’re integrating additional image and attachment support with a better interface, AND introducing video tutorial support! We’re launching the new site with FLV support only (we’ll have a tutorial on how to convert any of your videos to FLV format before you upload) but an automated conversion system similar to YouTube will be added shortly after launch along with several other areas we’re going to be introducing.

The image interface will also be getting quite an upgrade and along with a nifty thumbnail size slider, added tag, description and search functionality, you will now be able to share image collections with all your tutorials instead of 1 collection per tutorial like the current site. The publishing system will also be closely tied in to our upcoming credit system with numerous credit earning features.

Another exciting feature will be the tutorial recovery system, which is inspired from Word where a document can be recovered in the event that the program crashes or exits unintentionally before you save your work. Accidentally click on a button or close your browser in the middle of typing out a tutorial? No problem, go back to the Publishing System and you can access the lost document from the recovery console in a single click, or stick to your last saved document. The editor also comes with an auto-save feature you can turn on and off as desired to further help you avoid disasters!

So that’s it for another update gang, I hope you like what you see and I think we should be able to squeeze in another update or two before launch.

Take care!
Dan