What's new in PubCoder 4

Today we’re excited to introduce a new major release of PubCoder, version 4.0.

PubCoder 3.x has been our longest-lasting major release cycle; it has accompanied PubCoder users for more than three years with more than 30 updates, which brought many new features along the way: like XPUB and new iOS and Android native app exports based on this new format. Also, during the last year, we progressively delivered a new UI instead of waiting for a major release to bring it to light.

For this reason, PubCoder 4 may appear similar to the previous version at first sight. Instead, we actually put a lot of effort to modernize the technology stack that powers the application and “closed the circle”: bringing the same level of quality that our users experienced with XPUB and native apps exports also to our HTML export, which has been completely rewritten from the ground up and is now ready to allow you to deliver great, enriched user experiences to your audience, whether they use mobile, desktop or Chromium devices.

Under the hood

To start, we decided to modernize many things under the hood; for example, we are now using the latest and greatest WKWebView on the Mac for our stage and preview, while on Windows we finally made the switch to a 64-bit app. All of this will increase the stability and speed of the software. PubCoder 4 for Mac is a Universal app supporting Apple Silicon natively, so it will be screaming fast on M1 Macs.

As part of the modernization process, we are stepping up our system requirements: to run PubCoder 4 you will need a Mac running macOS 10.13 High Sierra or later or a PC running Windows 10 64-bit.

Brand new HTML5 Export

Our new HTML5 export has been completely rewritten and is now based on the same technology that powers our native readers. While our old HTML5 export was intended primarily for desktop, with PubCoder 4 you can export content that will work perfectly on both Mobile and Desktop devices; we also focused on delivering a great user experience when using both touch and mouse/trackpad/keyboard input on Chromebooks and computers using touch displays.

The new HTML5 export is faster and fixes several issues, including the ones with complex read aloud and soundtrack playback. It also improves audio performance and adds support for actions and functionalities previously found only on XPUB and native exports. It lays the foundations to bring up improvements and new features faster in the future, simultaneously as they are brought to XPUB, iOS App and Android App exports.

Quiz Widget Goodies

We have improved the quiz widget a lot: now, it allows us to save user answers to find them there when changing the page or closing the app or browser. We also added the ability to show randomly chosen questions from a preset list and increased customizability by adding the option to turn on/off the power to reset the answers or reveal the correct ones.

Finally, our Shelf customers can now choose to upload users answers to the cloud to sync them among the user’s devices and build custom educational solutions.

Other Notable Additions

• New Double Tap and Press events for even more engaging interactivity.
• The much-requested ability to Export Project Preview as a PDF file.
• Support for Shelf DRM.

Other changes and bugfixes

• Pinch event now accepts whatever modifier key (alt, key, shift, meta) to double-click to zoom out.
• Fixed Pan and Zoom widget on mobile devices.
• Fixed Accelerometer and Shake events for iOS App Export and XPUB export when using PubReader and Shelf on iOS (requires updated PubReader app).
• Fixed a problem that caused loss of changes when switching page in PubCoder with a text box still open in editing mode.
• (Windows) Fixed an issue that caused PubCoder to fail to init communication with PubReader after the first launch.
• Fixed temporary connection errors when previewing an HTML export in browser (now PubCoder waits for the webserver to come alive before launching the browser).
• Reduced base project files size by almost 5MB by removing some unnecessary cache files.
• EPUB Compiler: generated cover image now passes through image size checks as other generated images.
• (Windows) Fixed a crash that may occur on startup.
• Changed assets file name normalization so that the complete file name of a file cannot exceed 100 characters to fix 1101 error on windows caused by more-than-255-characters-long paths, e.g. adobe stock using very long file names.
• Fixed rounding issue with “Reduce Pixels Density to meet iBooks Store image size limit”, which may have resulted in generating images bigger than 4 megapixels anyway due to rounding issues.
• Many more minor improvements and bug fixes.