We just released Laguna Survey 2.2 on our servers.
This release updates functionality in different places in Laguna Survey, and seeks simply to update aspects of the program where there was room to improve. The updated features are:
• In surveyCanvas, a new element 'Video'. You can now (for starters) place YouTube videos directly in your survey, by cutting and pasting the embed code for a video from a YouTube page into surveyCanvas.
This should be great for marketing campaigns, product surveys etc.
This is a start. Even if it is quite easy to upload and use video from YouTube, we want to give our users more alternatives, both to the sources of video and the format. This will come in a later update.
• More powerful branching. Before, when setting up branching, you could specify a set of conditions and one target. Well, now you can specify multiple targets, in the Branching panel, for the question type Multiple Choice - one answer (radio buttons - the only question type this is feasible for).This has been a request from some of our larger customers, and we responded. It makes it possible to set up very powerful rules for branching, and we frankly think this is one of the most powerful branching systems out there, and at the same time it is actually easy to use!
For this question type, you can specify as many targets as there are answer alternatives (if you have that many pages), including the 'Last page' and 'End Survey' alternatives.
• Sticky preferences. This has been a long time coming, we know, but now Laguna Survey at last has a flexible system for handling preferences that survive from session to session. The first thing we have implemented is remembering the states of the 'Autoscroll' and 'Show element frames' in surveyCanvas, and Autoscroll got it first for a good reason.
Autoscroll is a great feature when you start using surveyCanvas, because it always brings the currently selected element into view. So, it makes very good sense to enable Autoscroll by default.
However, some of our larger customers have started producing very advanced surveys, with the number of questions and pages reaching the 50-70 range. Now, Autoscroll starts to become a nuisance, because you have to wait for the survey to come down the line (an XML structure sent by way of AJAX) and then for the browser to render same, and then the autoscroll will kick in and scroll the page to the bottom of the survey, to the last question. This can take many seconds for large surveys, and is not optimal, especially if you know that you are actually going to change something in the beginning of the survey.
This situation is now remedied in a simple and effective way. Just uncheck Autoscroll, and then it is off. Until you choose to switch it on again. Next time you open surveyCanvas, no Autoscroll. So you can start working immediately.
• This version sneaks in a new element that is only visible to our subscribers: A Text line table. Although not a major addition, it is a very handy element, and makes for a more effective survey in specific situations. You can try this element out in the demo.
This is our way of starting to walk down a path that we think will lead to a standard version that will contain more or less what you see in Laguna Survey today, and a premium version that will contain more of the features that is important for a certain segment of the market. That is all we can communicate at the moment.
• We have rearranged and added commands in the Participants panel, and put them all into a command menu. We are very pleased with the result, check it out for yourself!
We've also done some major work to make Laguna Survey more robust.
There are certain characters that any webapp has a hard time swallowing as user input, especially for an advanced app like Laguna Survey, where user input at one time or another might be parsed into XML, sent in emails, added to mySQL tables, handed over to a Java servlet as labels to use for rendering a chart, output in Excel and Word files, and generally thown around by AJAX. At the same time, the app should be able to handle such 'unexpected' input without any problems. Before this release we went hunting for situations where problems had arisen for our users, and then tried to take a holistic approach to fixing it. We think the result in Laguna Survey 2.2 is that it is very robust indeed.
Some more specific bugs have also been dealt with:
- The Drop-down menu element didn't work properly in the browser Firefox.
- There was a problem resetting the Minimum/Maximum that can be selected in question type Multiple Choice - multiple answers.
- In some rare cases the diagram for Multiple Choice - multiple answers could fail to render correctly in Result Diagrams when branching had been used.