After several weeks of hard work and a big sprint we are proud to announce the public release of Sprout Builder Version 1.5 today. We were lucky to get coverage from Techcrunch and Mashable this morning.. thanks guys! There are many new features that Austin will post in a Changelog, but here's a teaser:

The 1.5 release will increase the ease of use and robustness of the Sprout platform and will include the following new features:

• Undo/Redo/History: Sprout now keeps track of your last 20 actions per page in your Sprout! No more fears of moving your objects a few pixels by accident!
• Google Forms Component: Survey your users and receive feedback directly into your Google Spreadsheets
• Twitter Component: Display your Tweets directly in your Sprout!
• Ribbit Component: Make phone calls from your Sprout!
• Seesmic Video Component: Show off your Seesmic vlogs
• Help Panel: Get help, tutorials, and watch HOTWO videos while you are building your sprout.
• Animation effects: Want your videos to 'fly in from the left'? We're adding several new animation effects that you can apply your sprout's elements
• Post Sprouts to Facebook's mini-feed, events, and groups: Use the Public Sprout (seed) Page's URL to post "Facebook Shared Links"

The Sprout SDK will allow Web services to integrate their service into the Sprout platform, joining current Sprout service partners Google (forms and charts), Yahoo! (maps), Twitter, ChipIn, PollDaddy, Ribbit, and Seesmic. Sprout users can include these services into their sprout content and incorporate video, audio, images, components and more. With the Sprout SDK other Web services can now introduce their service to Sprout users, as well as give their current users access to the ultimate "mashup" tool.

For information on the Sprout SDK, see http://sproutbuilder.com/developers.

Here is a video our interns made this weekend to show off the new V1.5 features. Thanks Thomas and Chris!

The Sprout v1.5 release also squashed these bugs:

• Sprout logo/share bar share button should pop up a link to the public sprout(seed) page of the sprout is too small for the Share panel or too small for the copy and paste URL
• Mouse pointer disappears after right clicking an object
• RSS News Feed component fonts other than the default "Tahoma" creates extra white space after the article when previewing or publishing
• Facebook thumbnail isn't showing jukebox properly
• Clicking preview before all elements have loaded stops loading of those elements
• RSS news feed component's links don't pop up the copy and paste URL dialog in MySpace
• Copy and Paste URL dialog is misformatted in small sized (160x75) sprouts
• RSS News feed's "launch links in same window" doesn't pop up the "preview same page link" warning when links are clicked in preview mode
• Pan(Hand) tool should change to pointer when hovering over a panel (such as Pages, Properties, etc.)
• Calendar component's list view doesn't show events that span multiple days... after the 1st day of the event
• Using an image as the Button fore/background spills over it's borders
• Components may not display the correct font
• The first time a component icon is clicked it may not add the component to the canvas
• Manually rotating images skews them (with the properties panels dials)
• I put a rectangle with a border but no fill in the foreground, but can't select anything behind it
• Manually using "copy and paste" HTML code doesn't work on blogger.com, however using the quick-post does
• Calendar component doesn't load .Mac's iCal subscribe URL webcal:// protocol
• Can't see the Report's Date section in IE 7
• Rapidly clicking on tools panel icons multiple times each sometimes disables the icon
• Copy this URL (on sites like myspace) pane won't close in "micro sized" sprouts
• Border width resets to 1 when entering a border width by keyboard for objects that currently have 'no border'
• Jukebox line dividers are strange lengths
• When selecting a page fill color, automatically change it's fill type to 'solid' if currently on 'no fill'
• Button component's label doesn't display '<' characters
• When moving multiple elements up or down with "move to back/front", their layer order should be preserved
• Existing selected elements need to be deselected before unlocking
• Resizing another component in front of the thumbnail menu can trigger Thumbnail Menu disable "X-out" page action
• RSS News Feed: clicking HTML (image) links redirect browser while builder is in edit mode
• Mouse pointer doesn't change to hand icon when pressing spacebar after a page refresh
• Mouse cursor disappears after deselecting the hand tool with the space bar until the mouse is moved again
• Poll Daddy's login pop up box should default focus to the "OK" button when pressing [ENTER] to submit form
• Delete key doesn't delete object after add media popup is closed
• Rotation value not reset in transform tab when object is reset
• Hand tool's double-click to center canvas may not center canvas when double-clicking in the far edges of the browser window
• Size of Properties Panel's opened categories should be more user friendly to smaller screens
• Dragging an asset on the canvas from the asset tray should not position it in the top right corner of the stage in XP
• Other bug fixes