It’s rare that we get an opportunity to make changes to some of the foundational pieces of our app, but over the last couple of months, we’ve been working on a big update to the Rapt Media Composer. What started as a code refactor and performance upgrade turned into a rethinking of the user experience and interface.

There's a lot of new features, and we're excited to share the results with our customers.

Rapt Media Composer: What’s new?

While everything will be faster and smoother, there are three areas of the Rapt Media Composer that are going to have visible changes.

• We’ve created a project workflow that allows users to see everything related to their project in one context, from settings to distribution.
• The persistent media panel allows you to navigate through the Composer while media is uploading.
• The node editor is now full screen, and we’ve made a few changes to make hotspot creation and styling much easier.

More on these updates below...

Project workflow

Everything about your project is available inside the project now. When you click into a project from your home screen, you’ll see there’s a new sidebar:

You can access project settings, the project path editor, distribution settings, and analytics all using this sidebar.

Settings

Set your project title and description here. We’ve got some exciting new features lined up for this space, so keep an eye out!

Project path editor

Our project path editor has had an interface update, including a new toolbar. There aren’t any new tools in the toolbar yet, but we’ve got some great new features lined up for development over the coming months.
You can still select multiple nodes by holding the shift key and dragging to select, but you can also use the marquee select tool in the toolbar.

You can also use the toolbar tools to edit or delete nodes.

Publishing and distribution

This is the go-to place for everything about sharing a project with the rest of the world, including, publishing, republishing, share links, embed code building, and privacy settings.

Analytics

Our Enterprise customers with access to our analytics dashboard can see metrics on projects for specific date ranges and look at user demographics like device and location information.

Media panel

The media panel is persistent throughout the Composer now. You can start an upload from anywhere in the app and navigate around without losing your upload progress.

Node editor

Autosave & full screen

Probably the biggest change to the user experience in the node editor is that all changes within the node editor are autosaved. No more save button! You’ll also notice that it’s full screen now, which allows for much more room to create and edit hotspots.

Guides

We’ve gotten rid of the automatic guides in our node editor, and have added the ability to create guides. By clicking on the rulers, you can create horizontal and vertical guides for the hotspots to snap to.

Hotspot creation

Speaking of hotspot creation, you can now draw the hotspot onto the screen when creating it within the node editor. Instead of clicking the “add hotspot” button and having the new hotspot placed randomly on the video canvas, you select the “hotspot” tool and draw it where you want it to be.

Hotspot copy / paste!

Yes! Finally! You can copy and paste hotspots using the standard CTRL-C / CTRL-V (or Command-C Command-V on Mac). You can paste across nodes, or event projects, and it copies over the hotspot styles, text and behavior. There's no user interface for this yet, but that's coming soon!

Properties panels

Lastly, we’ve simplified and cleaned up the properties panels for nodes and hotspots. For hotspots, we found we were constantly shifting between the “Behavior” and “Style” tabs as we were working on hotspots, so we consolidated them into one panel with accordion sections that can be collapsed or expanded.

There are now color pickers that allow you to choose your color visually, or using color codes like RGBA or hex.

The node properties panel now has accordion sections for “Properties” and “Behavior.”

Next steps

Check it out for yourself

You can log into your account and try it out, or watch our demo interactive video below to see it in action.

Sign up for the live demo

We’re going to hold a live demo on Tuesday, May 17 where we’ll demo the Composer and have some Q&A with the audience.

Let us know what you think

Have questions? Email support@raptmedia.com and someone will help you. Have feedback? We’d love to hear it! Hit up feedback@raptmedia.com with any feedback or suggestions.