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Dreamler web-app is here!

The last year, most of our technical development efforts have gone into converting the existing Dreamler app to a web app that can run in web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge…), without having to download & install it. This should help new Dreamler users to onboard easier. If you want to try it out right away, it is available at the address https://user.dreamler.com/webapp/

New features in version 1.10.4

Gemstones

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The two building blocks known as Checkpoints and Milestones have been given a facelift, making them more visually prominent. They now look like gemstones. This is a small step towards our goal of making Dreamler feel more like a casual game.

View-links

In the top left corner, we have added a new button, “Create Viewlink”. When you click that button, the address in the web browser’s address bar will change to something like:

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As opposed to the short original address https://user.dreamler.com/webapp/ this new longer address contains information about which board you currently have open, and even where on that board you are currently looking. Why is this useful? Because:

  1. It means that if you save this address somewhere, for example as a “bookmark” or “favorite” in your web browser, and then later click that bookmark, it always leads right back to where you were, to the same board and position.
  2. You can also copy the address and send it to a colleague. “Hey, check out this part of the project!” Note that this does not change Dreamler’s existing model of user access control. The address doesn’t work as an invitation link for new users. Just having the address alone is not enough for anyone to be able to enter your board. Your colleague must still have a Dreamler user account, and be invited as participant to your board, just like Dreamler has always worked.

A view-link generally refers to an absolute position on the board, which means that if someone moves activities/groups around on the board, the view-link doesn’t automatically follow to their new position. But if you zoom in very close to a single activity/milestone and create a view-link there, that link will be smart enough to follow the activity even if it moves.

You might wonder how these “View-links” work in the classic non-web version of Dreamler? Obviously, that version doesn’t have an address bar. Instead, when you click “Create Viewlink”, the address is instead copied into your system clipboard (that’s the temporary storage space for Cut, Copy and Paste) so you can paste the address into a web browser. However, even if a link was created by the classic non-web version of Dreamler, it can still only be opened in the web version. We plan to remove that limitation in the future.

Image upload

Uploading images to activities is more convenient in the web version. You can now drag & drop, or copy & paste. But uploading a board image or a user image is a bit less convenient than before. When you click the image, a new tab will open in your browser, where you can upload the image, then close that tab to return to the Dreamler webapp. We’ll fix this to be more convenient later.

Smaller new features and bugfixes

Prettier display of so-called “avatars”. When other people are working on the board at the same time, you now see their picture moving around. Also better display when they “follow” you, or you follow them.

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When you entered a large board for the first time, the loading screen could take a very long time. Now we made it much faster, and added download progress bars.

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Changed color of the links between activities. The links used to be gray. Now they are colored based on the preceding activity.

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Hide milestone flags in Done state, show only Planned ones. To make the board look less cluttered, and make it easier to focus on the future.

Dreamler is now compatible with some more, older, graphics cards. If it’s not compatible, shows a polite error messages instead of just crashing.

Prettier on/off buttons to toggle options in “User settings”.

When you click your portrait in “Me” view, or another portrait in “Participants” view, to highlight all activities assigned to that person, it used to be quite slow – now it’s much faster! We also slightly increased the speed of the free-text search.

If your computer couldn’t run a big Dreamler board at good speed, and you did input using the keyboard, Dreamler could sometimes skip some key presses. Now all key presses should register, even when it’s slow.

Fix bug which caused a ~1 sec pause when you clicked on the header bar of a large group containing lots of activities.

Fix bug which caused a pause when you clicked on an activity.

When you “followed” another participant, the group titles were sometimes placed weirdly. Fixed them better now.

In general, Dreamler should run faster than before. Speed optimizations to text rendering and off-screen culling.

Several bug fixes related to losing connection and reconnecting.

Compatibility

For some users, the Dreamler web app will be noticeably slower than the classic downloaded & installed Dreamler. We recommend that you first try in the latest version of Firefox, because it’s the fastest. But if that doesn’t work on your computer, you can try another browser instead. We don’t recommend it in Microsoft Edge (slowest) or Internet Explorer (doesn’t work at all).  If you find the web app too slow, download and install the classic Dreamler instead.

The web app currently doesn’t work on a phone or tablet, just on a computer. We’ll fix that if there is enough demand.

Because of differences between a “native” app and a “web” app, new bugs might have appeared. You’re welcome to report bugs to us.

The future

All the above bug fixes are included in both the web app and the classic non-web variant of Dreamler. We plan to continue maintaining both variants in parallel for the foreseeable future.

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