We are pleased to announce that we just released Laguna Survey version 2.1 to new and existing customers alike.
In this version we have focused on surveyCanvas and strengthening its feature set and interface. The headline features for this version are:
- Undo/Redo
- Insert/Edit menus are now true command menus
- A redesigned Global options panel that looks and behaves great
1. That's right, surveyCanvas now sports a five-level undo/redo buffer, and it works just like you would expect in a desktop application.
In a way, this is a strange feature to tout. Any ol' application certainly has undo functionality, right? Yes, and it's something we have come to take for granted. In desktop applications, at least.
The situation is different for web applications. For one thing, applications running inside a browser do not have access to application menus. Another aspect is that often, the operations that you would need undo for is taken care of by the browser undo function. For instance when entering text in a email message in Gmail or other web based email software: If you type something that you shouldn't have, hit the browser undo and the text in that text box reverts to its previous state, courtesy of the browser's undo buffer, not the web app's. In other web app contexts, undo simply doesn't make sense for one reason or another.
As a result, it seems that undo has never really made it into the mainstream of web applications, regardless of whether it would be useful or not.
surveyCanvas, and any other web service for producing questionnaires, is a perfect example of a web app that really benefits from undo functionality. Here, the browser has no grasp of what is going on, conceptually speaking, as you build your questionnaire, so it cannot provide any sensible functionality for undo in such a context. So it is up to the web app.
But you have to build your questionnaire-building web app carefully for it to be able to provide undo. in SurveyCanvas, the questionnaire exists as a Javascript object on the client side and an xml structure server side. The XML structure server side is authoritative and is where the undo buffer is kept and synced back to the client side on undo.
So, while undo/redo is something that we'd like our customers to take for granted, we are still happy to have it nailed down in surveyCanvas in this version. Now you don't have to worry if you accidentally delete the wrong element, that one with the long list of answer alternatives of car dealerships in your area.
2. The insert and Edit menus behave differently in this version. Well, there wasn't any Edit menu prior to this version, only buttons that executed the various edit commands. We added several commands in this version, and what we found was that the Tools palette was becoming too cluttered again.
The obvious solution was to gather all the commands into a menu. Menus on the web are not really meant for executing commands like in an application menu, where the commands execute the instant you select something from the menu, but this is what we have done with both the Edit and the Insert menu in this version. We hope you like it! See the linked blog entry above for more info on this.
3. As for the Globals Options panel, we thought it was high time to give it a make-over. The new version takes up far less space in its default state, can be expanded and collapsed at will, and works the same or better, especially the colour wheel. By the way, we use Steven Wittens great Farbtastic jQuery library to provide the color wheel.
Other enhancements in this version:
- 'Duplicate' and 'Move to end' in the Edit menu in surveyCanvas. Together these make it easy to build new pages in your questionnaire based on existing ones.
- New option to toggle the Question Area autoscroll on/off in the Tools panel.
- Support for .csv files when importing participant data.
- Possibility for exporting your questionnaire as a Microsoft Word file. This feature is accessible in the window that opens when pressing "Print/Export" in the Tools panel of surveyCanvas.
- The Results and Result Graphs pages now show "wait" graphics while the results pages are being built instead of just showing a blank page.
- Better functionality to stop indexing bots opening a survey from an open link posted on the web and thereby counting as a participant.
- The Laguna Survey User's Manual has been updated to reflect the changes in version 2.1.
Bugs exterminated:
- Pressing an update button in survey admin would just grey it out if the current session was expired. Now the user is correctly logged off with an appropriate message.
- Fixed a situation where clicking any of the links in the 'Finish' page of a survey in Preview would open a Sonora IT webpage inside the Preview.
- Fixed 'no email provided' from showing up in the email input field in the Test panel resulting from using the open test link.
- A couple of localization errors were fixed.
Known issues:
- The colour wheel in surveyCanvas does not correctly update its view in some versions of the browser Opera. It does however update the colour correctly, and the technical functionality is not affected by this bug. We are investigating this issue.
- The Text box input in the Options panel does not scroll its contents correctly in the browser Opera in cases where there is a lot of text in the box. We are investigating this issue. The technical functionality is not affected by this bug.
Also, we've made some significant changes under the hood in this version, which will serve us well in taking Laguna Survey forward in the months and years to come. Stay tuned!