v0.7.98 App Release
+ Introduced pl4yr links
+ Added a friends/notification system
+ Users can now change profile picture
+ Improved game detection
+ Minor UI tweaks
Introduced pl4yr links
Ever wanted to quickly show all your social links in one nice little window? Well, you could beforehand but now you can do it with pl4yr!
Users can now customise their own mini profile which will currently showcase their social links (if they choose to put them on there) and in the future, we are hoping to be able to share gaming stats with each other. Choose from your most played game or show your latest gaming history, these are just a few ideas which we plan to implement in the near future once this has been fully looked at.
Added a friends/notification system
This has been something that I have been fighting against for a long time. For those that know our earlier instances of the app and everything we’ve played with, we have tried friends and profiles but it just took over and we became just another social media app which is not what we’re aiming for. Since then we have talked about a friends system and how it could benefit users actually having a list of friends rather than just looking up their name and adding them to a comparison list. With some of the features that we’re still working on, the friend's list will be really helpful and make gaming with friends easier, which is what our aim is. Along with the friend's system we introduced a notification area, this currently only shows when you get a request for a friend but as always, we do have plans to have various other notifications plugged in there.
Users can now change profile picture
It’s only something small but it allows users to start to personalise the application and make it feel like their own rather than just a generic boring app. When a user changed their profile picture it also updated their pl4yr links page too, allowing for that additional personalisation.
We did have a little hiccup when the profile pictures first launched, it turned out that any picture that was uploaded was set to the default profile picture…for everybody. We had a laugh for 5 minutes whilst we were testing it and finding out what the issue was but luckily it was an easy find and quick to remedy.
Improved game detection
We have been getting a lot of feedback from users that the app was picking up a lot of unnecessary programs that have been installed via windows updates and whatnot after we improved the detection of games being installed through the windows store or the Xbox app. This has been fixed so that only games/programs that have been installed by the user will be picked up, allowing for a cleaner and more reliable library. We have also fixed a couple of issues where the app would register a program as something else as we found out whilst opening chrome, the app would think we were playing “The Guild 3" instead. This has been fixed but there are still some instances where a game or another launcher will trigger the app into thinking something else is playing. We’re trying to narrow down the suspects and slowly getting there with it.
Minor UI tweaks
Whilst adding in the new friend's system we were torn on how to display it without taking over the rest of the app. We decided that the friend's window would be located on the right, and whilst playing with that we toyed with the idea that the main navigation panel on the left could retract too, so we tried it out and it worked out surprisingly well so we pushed it live.
Along with this we also allowed users to reduce the size of the app, rather than it taking up 7/8ths of the screen by default it can now be dropped to its original small window size.
Download the latest version. Come join us on Facebook, and Discord for more info or even if you have any questions about the app, we’re always happy for more feedback about the app too.
