Well, this isn't my first post, but I've never formally introduced myself to all of you - so here goes. I'm Jason Ricci, Sprout's Chief Product Officer. Like most of us here, my job description is pretty blurry as we all wear many hats...primarily, I lead the direction of the product and manage it's design and development. You might find me cranking out wireframes, designing user interfaces, or "debating" the differences between a Papalote, La Corneta or Taqueria Cancun burrito with my fellow Sproutees in the SF office.

So...the other day, while discussing how much we thought Papalote would sell us their salsa recipe for, Carnet pointed us to a Techcrunch posting about the trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie. We noticed right away that they had a widget, but were rather disappointed with the functionality it offered. We knew we could do better, so I set out to build a better Indiana Jones sprout. So, after a little tinkering and tweaking, I'm happy to release it out into the wild. Enjoy!

Hey Sprouters...

Once again, I'm happy to announce another big release - v1.1. We've managed to squash a few more bugs, but more importantly, we've added some cool new features you've all been asking for. Here's a list of the major new features:

1. Save As - yup, you can now clone a project as many times as you like.
2. External links from Myspace - since MySpace doesn't allow links to sites outside of myspace, we've adjusted our player to display all links as a copy and paste URL when clicked inside of MySpace.
3. Hand tool to grab and move the canvas - this feature is for all of you building BIG sprouts. Check out the hand icon in the tools bar - select it, and you can move your sprout anywhere on the screen while in the builder.
4. Multi-color preview backgrounds - for those of you building sprouts with black backgrounds, you can now toggle the color of the preview screen's background by clicking anywhere on the screen in preview mode. Colors will toggle from black to grey to white and back again.
5. Keyboard shortcuts for the power users - CTRL+X (cut), CTRL+C(copy), CTRL+V(paste)
6. Google Gadget XML - for those of you building Gadgets, you can now view Google Gadget XML and preview sprout as a Google gadget on the Publish screen
7. The Add Media pop up now allows files to be reordered by dragging and dropping (very useful for components such as the slideshow and jukebox)
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Hey Everybody

I'm happy to announce the release of Sprout v1.0.1...we've added a few new features and, thanks to all of your great feedback, were able to track down and squash a lot of bugs. These updates will automatically appear the next time you login - if you're currently logged in, save your open project and shift+reload to pull down the updates.

This is our first major release since launching a few weeks ago, and we've got a LOT more exciting changes on the way. We really appreciate the feedback you've all provided so far, and I hope you'll see that reflected in the way Sprout "grows" from here on out. I encourage you to keep the feature requests and bug reports coming, and keep your eyes on the Blog and Forums for more exciting announcements.

Also, for every major release, we'll be posting our changelog on the website so that you can keep track of what we've been up to. For this release I'll paste the changlog below.

Thanks!
j

New Features:

• Support for common non-english languages - use "Helvectia (Int'l)" font
• Publish pop up includes a link to save Google Gadget XML
• Selected elements can be deselected with the shift key + click

Squashed Bugs:

• RSS News Component may pull in the wrong feed
• Yahoo Maps Component's zoom levels 14 and higher don't work - Limited zoom levels to maximum of 14
• WinXP / IE 7 Clicking empty space to the left of the Manager Tray Tabs doesn't close opened trays
• When trying to highlight text, the entire text element moves
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