Introducing the all-new Apture Media Hub. We’ve spent the last five months listening to your feedback and redesigning the Media Hub to be faster, easier, more customizable and give you the fine grain control you asked for. As of today, everyone who has Apture installed can open the Media Hub and begin using the new version automatically. And if you don’t have Apture, you should sign up now.
Here’s a breakdown of all the new features.
Easier Search Navigation
Now you can click along the search categories at the top of the Media Hub to filter by media type. Click Videos to instantly see videos from Apture’s 13+ video sources. Or click Reference to see background materials and reference articles. Find what you want, faster.
Drag & Drop Linking Multiple Media
Now you can link by simply dragging and dropping media into the left-hand Link Bar. You can also use Apture to embed multiple media right into the page so readers can experience the full 360 degrees around a topic without leaving their place.
For example, if I want to link information about the new Star Trek movie, I can aggregate all the interesting information about the movie, the actors, and the interviews just like this:
Customizable Sources
The new Media Hub lets you customize the sources the way you want. You can remove the sources you don’t like, and add the ones you do – it’s all up to you. Just click on the Customize button to setup the sources in a specific category. Some media categories, like Images for example even let you to add a custom search within a specific domain (e.g. only images from http://graphics8.nytimes.com).
More Sources
We’ve added Google Books and NPR podcasts to the mix of content you can quickly find and link. But it’s even better. You can link to the specific page of any book you find. Think about that for a second – you can reference any page of a book and let your audience experience it in the moment. You can reference famous quotes from Charles Dickens, or just give context to one of your childhood classics:
Fine Grain Control
Title and Caption – Edit the title & caption in Apture windows to control the messaging
Resizing Content – Use the pulldown menu when previewing a media item to change its size. This will determine the size of the media when it is viewed by a reader.
Content-Specific Options
You can link to a specific page of a Google Book or document, to a time offset (mm:ss) in a video, the specific section of a Wikipedia article, or even a point in a map.
When you link to a video time offset with Apture, the video will jump right to that moment when played while still letting the viewer choose to go back or fast forward. Here’s an example, using an interview with Barack Obama.
As always, Apture works with WordPress, TypePad, MovableType, and Blogger. Support for more platforms is coming soon.
We think you’re going to love the new version of Apture, and we’d love to hear your feedback as you gather ideas and see things in the product you wish we could improve. Please send us your thoughts and leave comments on this post!
We can’t wait to hear from you.
. There are a lot of new features. Good thing I read this or else I wouldn’t have known about it all.