This is a really big update, folks!
Important Note about Notifications
This upgrade will clear out your current notification list and start you over, due to a notifications schema change. We apologize for the inconvenience. We’re about finished with Private Beta, after which we will always migrate your data on upgrades.
New Apps!
If you’re using the Desktop apps, please download the latest versions here. For iOS beta testers, a new iOS update should be arriving shortly via TestFlight.
You’ll want to delete your old apps and replace them with these versions. Soon we’ll have a new native client shell that will not require a new download with each upgrade.
Important Known Issue for Mac Users
If you are using Ryver in a Mac browser, we have a known issue where real-time updates might stop working after sleeping/waking your computer. We are close to an update with a fix, but in the mean time, it is safest to either log out and back in between sessions, or at least refresh your browser tab after waking your computer from sleep.
Feature and Naming Changes
- Renaming of Rooms and Users: Rooms are now called Teams, and Users are called Members.
- Teams: In an effort to bring more continuity between 1:1 and Group communication, we have decided to use Team instead of “Room”, and we changed the icon to represent a group of people.
- Members are paying users who can participate in Team communication AND 1:1 communication. Private members can only access the Teams they are invited to (replacement for what was “Guest Users”). Full Access members can access any Open Access team, plus any teams they are invited to.
- In the coming weeks, we will be adding a new user type that will be known as a “Single Team Guest“. These users will be free and can be added to any Private Team. They can only be part of one team at a time, and they can only Chat and Post within the Team context. They cannot do 1:1 chatting and posting with other users.
- What was the Members tab on a Room is now the Teammates tab for a Team. Teammates can be either Members or Guests.
- Promote Chat to Post: You can now select one or more chat messages and “promote” the resulting chat transcript to a special type of Post that shows the chat transcript below the subject and note.
- This is handy for turning chat into a threaded discussion, or for grabbing important information and preserving it in Posts for others to easily find.
- You can promote your selected chat messages to the member or team you are currently on, or you can pick another member or team to place the post in.
- Chat emoticons: We have completed an initial phase of emoticon support
- Unicode emoticons are supported: These are the emoticons found on the special emoticon keyboard on your phone.
- A set of named emoticons are supported. Examples are (wink), (smile), or (tableflip). Note that the name is always enclosed in parentheses.
- There is an emoticon button on the chat tab now. Hover over one of the emoticons to see the corresponding name, should you want to just type one in, rather than selecting via the button.
- Markdown Toolbar: We now have a basic formatting toolbar when you are composing a post, to help you learn markdown formatting. There is also a Preview option now, to see how your formatted post will look.
- Note that Markdown is also supported on comments and in chat messages, though we don’t include the toolbar there.
- Why Markdown? Because it is an easy to learn formatting syntax that looks good as plain text and can also be easily translated to perfectly formed HTML. And once you learn it, it’s FAST!!
- Up Vote / Down Vote: We have replaced “Thumbs Up” with Up Vote / Down Vote on posts and comments for more versatility. For example – create a post to conduct a poll of your teammates.
- Sort Posts by Create Date or Recent Activity: There is now a sort button on Posts tabs and the Post Stream, so that you can opt to sort by recent activity, which includes new comments. Thus, an old post could rise up to the top of the list if one or more people suddenly start commenting on it again.
- New Chat Messages Indicator: On the Chat tab underneath a Member or Team, you will now see an orange, pulsing dot when there are new messages and you are on one of the other tabs, such as Posts or Files.