Blog
15 Jan, 2023
- [bugfix] Colour button not properly saving values
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5 Jan, 2023
- [Bugfix] Unable to drag recorded video in Firefox
- [Bugfix] Navigation icons not always appearing for pages with recorded media
- [New] Ability to track cursor movements when recording from microphone or webcam
- [New] Themes all support playback of cursor position (when set)
- [New] New toggle to allow/prevent cursor recording in Settings
- [Change] Redesigned audio/video recording interface
- [Change] Video overlay playback decoupled from controls (design consistency)
- [Change] Moved score, media, attachments and colour settings underneath page preview pane (design consistency).
- [Change] Changed internal file storage to Blobs
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26 Dec, 2022
- [Bugfix] Fixed toggle for Video Seek Bar visiblity
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29 Jun, 2022
- [Change] Removed animation & sound when switching pages
- [Change] Moved page audio feature to new dedicated media bar
- [New] Added page video feature (record from webcam or upload mp4 video)
- [New] Added audio visualiser in media bar
- [New] Themes now support page video
- [New] Dock theme supports new 'Floating' navigation elements (suggested by Nabil Guermouche) - see preset editing documentation
- [Bugfix] Fixed some untrapped errors dropping documents
- [Bugfix] Moved preview root in data warehouse
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27 Apr, 2022
- [Change] Changed scorm packages to only write objective data as the package terminates. Change will be picked up after packages are re-published.
- [Bugfix] Changed licencing of the backend/warehouse to support subscription expiry.
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6 Apr, 2022
By popular request, you can now subscribe to Course Assembler (yearly). Please drop us an email or hit us up on twitter if you would like different subscription types.
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30 Nov, 2021
PowerPoint media
PowerPoint media embedding broke at some point. Well, not broke as such, just the positioning of video elements over the top of slides was off. That has now been resolved. Also we are now supporting more embed options - so embedded videos should work as well as youtube, vimeo and slide audio.
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7 Oct, 2021
Internal Work
The innards of CourseAssembler are changing to better support file conversions. We have shifted the busywork of file conversion to a new server location and rewritten it to work more consistently and be able to support different conversion engines going forward. Everything should still work the same (or better - more image formats are now supported) - but please comment below or send an email if you experience any difficulties with file conversions.
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1 Sep, 2021
Cloud Upload and Download
Our cloud files provider (Kloudless) has been bought by another company and have discontinued the file picker and saver tools we have been using for many years. Until a suitable replacement can be found the Cloud load and save features have been removed. Sorry for any inconvenience!
This update also contains stability and performance improvements.
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23 Aug, 2021
Document Scaling options
Sometimes you have converted a PDF that was a presentation rather than a document. The default scaling mode for PDF is to scale to the width of the viewport which may result in a vertical scrollbar.

For a document that an be split into multiple pages such as a presentation or PDF, there is a new toolbar item called Scaling.
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13 Aug, 2021
Quick bugfix: MP4 videos over around 500MB were silently failing to upload properly. We have changed the way large videos are stored internally and republished the app.
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7 Aug, 2021
Minor hiccup. We ran into a problem with our current server hosting solution and had to do a quick change to another company. Any technical glitches you may have been experiencing in the last few days should now be resolved. Sorry for any inconvenience.
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14 Jul, 2021
Fairly minor bigfixes
- Fixed a bug re-loading Intro and Picture type pages from a published zip
- Support Safari in font picker
- Better loading of fonts in Markdown pages.
- Fixed the settings button icon!
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12 Jul, 2021
Themes overhaul, part 2
Themes have received more updates, predominantly changes to the menu as well as some visual changes in the editor and minor bugfixes. The editor has had some icon changes made to the menu: Icon helpers have been added for renaming and deleting navigation items due to some accessibility issues renaming pages and using keyboard shortcuts for navigation (depending on where focus was). You cna now get a better idea of what types of item each navigation page is by its icon. The drag and indent icons have also changed to better represent the action they perform.
Menu items can now be indented twice - that's one whole extra place!

There are now Sections, Captioned images, and a bunch of bugfixes!
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10 Jun, 2021
Storing themes and courses
In this update we add the ability to store a preset. These are stored server-side against your licence key. They disappear when your licence expires, so it's more valuable for longer licence holders.
You can also publish a course to be stored on the server, and pick it up again on the 'Import Zip' dialogue. Pretty useful when you are trying out variations of a course, or have a common set of pages you always apply to your courses.
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1 Jun, 2021
Themes overhaul, part 1
Themes have had an overhaul. The TL;DR is:
- There are now now primary styles that define the overall functionality of a theme.
- Styles have a number of presets each.
- Presets are customisable through a simple editor. (See documentation)
- You get a live(-ish) functional preview of your content. Not everything works, but it's enough to get a feel for your course.
- You can turn things on and off (like print or navigation icons, or the completion tick).
- Oh yeah! You can now add a print icon which just prints the current page. Neat!
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1 May, 2021
Goodbye IE11
It's time. We have dropped IE11 support everywhere, including the content player due to its ever-increasing cost on our company. It's just too expensive to support going forward.
If you disagree with this decision or desparately need IE11 support, clarify your reasonings and then show real-world statistics in the comments section.
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1 Apr, 2021
Introducing the ... introduction
- Added Intro Page. You can now choose a pre-built introduction page with basic styling features that is populated with your course name, description and copyright during publishing.
- Changed layout of 'Upload files/links' to better explain each feature.
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23 Mar, 2021
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20 Mar, 2021
- [Bugfix] Audio on multiple pages could sometimes overlap
- [Bugfix] Downloading multiple attachments on one page could fail with a 'Failed - network error' message
- Minor styling changes in designs
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15 Mar, 2021
- You can now attach one or more files to each page.
- Users can download attachments in each design (link layout is a work-in-progress).
- You can now automatically navigate to the next page after audio finishes playing (set audio autoplay to be on).
- [Bugfix] Audio doesn't overlap as much when switching pages
- Updated documentation
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5 Mar, 2021
- [Bugfix] Fixed licencing issue
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3 Sep, 2020
- Removed BG Colour on iframe embeds (blocked by cross-site scripting)
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21 Aug, 2020
- Fixed wrapping of question numbers in Quiz
- [Bugfix] Earlier warnings for invalid URLs (Cannot read property 'result' of null)
- Updated Sentry
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2 Jun, 2020
- Fixed zoom image on embedded image renderer for images that are larger than the viewport
- Added option to explicitly embed pasted urls as a website (image)
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27 May, 2020
- Video (mp4) is able to be embedded
- Added icon for renaming pages (existing behaviour of pressing enter to rename not affected)
- Fixed corner cases of BG Colour button showing errors
- Internal logging additions to assist runtime error tracking
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23 May, 2020
- Added support for H5P packages (.h5p extension) (Uses xAPI completions - ensure your packages have xAPI enabled).
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17 May, 2020
- You can now add Markdown pages with a simple editor.
- You can drag images from your desktop into the Markdown editor to upload them.
- Redesigned Add content button to support upcoming content types
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24 Apr, 2020
- Cleaned up icons on PDF toolbar
- Added print icon to PDF toolbar
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18 Apr, 2020
Audio and autoplay
Popular current browsers have recently made a change where users are required to interact with a page (e.g. click on it, scroll it, tap it, etc) before the page is allowed to play audio. This stops advertisments and streaming video to blast out at you unexpectedly. This also stops pages from automatically playing any audio recorded on them. Generally once your user has launche the course the browsers considers that an interaction for all subsequent pages. Audio has been changed to match this behaviour, namely Audio no longer autoplays on page load (unexpected behaviour, requires user interaction).
[bugfix] Fixed problem re-importing page audio
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17 Apr, 2020
Directly embed iframes
There's embedding, and then there's oembedding. The o makes the difference - oembeds generally allow the url or external page to have some kind of tracking done on it, such as tracking how much of a video was watched, or knowing which slide a user is looking at. Embeddding is simply linking to an external page without the possibility of tracking what the user is doing on that page. You can now embed an iframe
Why can't you track an iframe? Because of browser security, tracking, and privacy. When you embed an iframe that links to and shows an external web page or set of pages (perhaps a Microsoft Stream video, or a portal page on your intranet) the course isn't able to track the pages or interactions within that iframe because of how browsers are designed. Good for privacy, bad for courses. When you embed an iframe the page is considered completed as soon as the learner looks at the page.
To embed an iframe, copy the EMBED or IFRAME code from the site you are trying to embed, or use code like:
<iframe src="/entries/2020/04/17/https://www.your-web-site.com/path/to/content.html"><<iframe>
Then paste this in to the 'Url / Embed' section when adding a new page. The embed will stretch to take up the available space, so you don't have to add any width or height properties yourself.
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31 Oct, 2019
- Fixed issue relating to reloading a suspended a quiz
- Added optional zoom controls to converted PDF documents
- Added optional PDF download to non-split documents
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24 Jul, 2019
- Fixed SlideShare resume at slide
- Fixed SlideShare completion rule
- Updated SlideShare nagivation icons for readability
- Minor bug fixes
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10 Jul, 2019
- Added better mobile navigation for side-bar derived designs
- Embedded media on Powerpoint (pptx) slides now plays in player after conversion
- Resolved scrolling issue in themes on iOS-based devices
- Better internal error logging and reporting
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1 Jul, 2019
- Reworked the icons and layouts of all themes
- Added 3 new themes
- Improvements to IE11 for published packages
- YouTube/Drive-hosted videos now play properly on Google Slides
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14 Jun, 2019
- Fixed SideBar menu icon not rendering properly on Edge, IE11
- Tweaks to how document centering / scaling works for split and non-split documents
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26 Mar, 2019
- Added Shift + Double-tap-delete to remove navigation item with its children
- Updated documentation
- Tweaked button placement in the Quiz
- Added ability to export a quiz to a JSON file
- Added the ability to import a quiz from a JSON file
- Various minor optimisations and bug fixes
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15 Mar, 2019
- Restyled and rebranded app (previously Document Ninja)
- Renamed themes to be easier to understand
- Extended API theming
- Dropped API while labelling
- Ability to attach mp3 to each page, or record page audio from your microphone
- Added basic (movable) audio player to output pages - more design options coming in next release
- Fixed up re-importing packages (persists more settings)
- Updated various embed options (e.g. soundcloud support broke in January 2019 - it's back again!)
- Dropped Imgur embedding (it may come back again in a future release)
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18 Dec, 2018
- Added option to apply background colour to all pages.
- All documents/presentations/images are now centered in the preview area.
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19 Sep, 2018
- New button designs for consistency across the app.
- Add Content button now features the drag, upload, paste and cloud functions in one popup.
- Adding a new quiz selects it by default
- Items in the left hand list will scroll into view if required (e.g. selecting items)
- Import now a separate button
- When you have reset or are just starting, it pops up the "Add content" screen
- Added a new "page background" feature to set the background colour of supported pages (not the quiz though, yet). Converted docs, images, videos, slideshare should all work with this. Useful when your slide size doesn’t match the window.
- When importing a document that is split, take the average background colour and make it the page background. So if your slide is mostly blue background with white text, the page background should be blue as well. Previously this was white or black.
- Added new sounds to actions
- Changed "yes/no" confirmation on buttons (like reset) to be a more descriptive popup
- Unified popups to all have the same design and to block the window while they are open (so you can’t click on actions that might mess up what the popup is getting you to do)
- Changed the icons in the 'add documents' list so text lines up better
- Added shortcuts
- click an item once to view it
- double click an item to rename it (or press enter on it)
- pressing enter in edit mode saves the value and goes back to a regular link
- pressing escape in edit mode returns you to a regular link without saving
- use the up / down arrow keys to navigate between items
- use the left / right arrow keys to change the indenting of items
- hold shift and use the up / down arrow keys to move the item up or down
- host control and shift and use the up / down arrow keys to move the item to the first or last position
- Audio support for pages
- ability to upload mp3 files to each page
- little icon to denote if the page has audio.
- ability to record your microphone and have it convert to mp3 in your browser.
- Made score selection more consistent
- Made the selection on the design page stand out more
- Changed slideshare embeds to pick up the page background colour better.
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16 May, 2018
- Quickly add multiple choice quizzes to your course.
- Embed images or videos into your quiz.
- Try out quizzes inside the DocNinja.
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12 Dec, 2017
- Updated externally targetted links on new documents to include rel="noopener"
- Ensure links are externally targetted on non-split documents
- Fixed spacing between pages on non-split documents
- Fixed webfont problem (icons temporarily vanished!)
- Catch and disallow download attempt while documents are still converting
- Fixed Kloudless integration for loading and saving documents to cloud-based storage sources
- Fixed spaces in downloaded zip name
- Various minor bugs noted after Firefox Quantum update.
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24 Nov, 2017
- Fixed bug in Firefox drag-to-reorder
- Updated indentation icons
- Added 4 new pro-tier prebuilt designs
- Internal optimisations
- Fixed a bug in scrolling in Side Bar, Drop-Down and Drop-Up menus
- Added data-compression to cmi.core.suspend_data to help avoid hitting 4000 byte api limit
- Fixed issue when re-loading suspend_data
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23 Nov, 2017
- Fixed bug in Firefox drag-to-reorder
- Updated indentation icons
- Added 4 new pro-tier prebuilt designs
- Internal optimisations
- Fixed a bug in scrolling in Side Bar, Drop-Down and Drop-Up menus
- Added data-compression to cmi.core.suspend_data to help avoid hitting 4000 byte api limit
- Fixed issue when re-loading suspend_data
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1 Nov, 2017
- Changed licensing model over to new system
- Introduced stubs to allow future updates to push content or messages
- Updated internal scripts inside published package code
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24 May, 2017
- Offer pro-tier designs
- Built stubs for theme customiser (future undated release)
- Optimise converted PDF files (convert PNG to JPG during save operation to reduce file size)
- Changed timestamping on engine files to avoid cache conflicts
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19 May, 2017
- Fixed contrasting colours on default templates
- Added Kloudless chooser and saver support for loading/saving packages to cloud services (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, etc)
- Changed header styling code to allow easier white-labelling via forthcoming API
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2 Sep, 2016
- Added design preview at tier 2
- Bugfixed ticket #608286
- Replaced colour picker
- Added ability to paste any website and convert to a splittable document
- Repositioned watermark on tier 1 published courses
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26 Aug, 2016
- Fixed Edge rendering issues
- Changed oembed endpoints due to depreciated third-party libraries
- Many misc small updates
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24 Jun, 2016
- Started writing down changelog!
- Fixed up commit log in git
- Removed mention of Beta code
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