Changelog

Announcing Arcade Growth

Today we're launching Arcade Growth! It's our newest plan that helps marketers to build, learn, and experiment fast.A few awesome things are included, including:

• Showing off your brand with custom logos
• Video editing - trim or speed up videos
• Learning from insights across many metrics
• Being able to collaborate as a team on high performing demos

Features

Insights for all! Insights is our new take on analytics. If you’ve used Arcade Analytics in the past, you’re going to love Insights. Insights redefine some key metrics we use to measure the success of your Arcades. You can read more about it here.

Improvements

• We updated our billing pages to allow users to change the billing name (as well as other information) so that invoices are rendered with the appropriate information.
• We now show visible feedback after granting user access to a team.

Bug fixes

• We fixed a bug that prevented some Teams customers from duplicating each other’s Arcades.
• We fixed a bug that prevented some Team Arcades from being branded.
• We fixed a bug where videos uploaded through the editor can’t be previewed in the library.
• We fixed a bug that prevented users from tagging Arcades that were rendered below the fold on the index page.

Features

• Custom Branding for your Arcades!
  

Improvements

• We added a better hint for triggering the fullscreen functionality. Previously, the Arcade viewer can be expanded into a fullscreen view by clicking on the green circle icon on the upper-left side of the Arcade, but our users found that hard to discover. So, we made it more visible by adding an icon to the upper right side of Arcade’s browser bar.
• We made an improvement to our image optimization, where we now ship images to your browser as AVIF or WebP, depending on what your browser can support. This leads to faster load times.
• We’ve made a bunch of small UI improvements in our loading states. Now you’ll see nicer-looking loading indicators throughout the app.

Bug fixes

• We’ve fixed several issues that prevented some users from uploading Arcades after a recording.

Features

• Chapters! We've upgraded the Start Overlay, and CTA features with a new feature called Chapters. Chapters allow you to break up your Arcade into sections. You can add a title, description, and button to each chapter. Check it out...

• You no longer have to wait for your GIFs and videos to generate. We'll now email you after we've generated them.

• Now you can upgrade to a Teams plan in-app during or after your trial expires.

Improvements

• We've added the title attribute to our embed code to help improve accessibility on your site.
• We now capture tax IDs on our checkout page.
• Smaller JavaScript bundle sizes for our viewer = faster page loads.

Bug fixes

• We made numerous UI improvements and bug fixes.
• We fixed an issue where the hotspot circle was misaligned with the mouse when being dragged.
• We fixed a handful of issues that prevented some users from capturing screenshots with the Chrome Extension.
• We made improvements to how the Chrome Extension handles uploading assets after a recording is complete.
• We fixed an issue where Arcade's editor was broken on computers behind certain VPNs or proxies. Some of these VPNs or proxies blocked Web Channel / Web Socket connections, which Arcade uses to communicate with the server. We've added a fallback to HTTP long polling to fix this issue.

In this cycle, we mostly focused on 4Ps (papercuts, polish, performance, productivity):

• Fixed a bug where the hotspot inspector was allowing changes to get lost when selecting a new step in the editor’s sidebar.
• Fixed a bug where Hotspots were cloned with their original ID causing issues in Analytics.
• Added more accurate progress tracking to video and image uploads.
• Free users trialing Teams can now upgrade on their own.
• We made several improvements to our Chrome Extension to help with the reliability of uploads v0.16.0.
• We added a setting to turn off video captures during a “Record Demo” session. This is useful if you want an Arcade composed of images v0.16.1.
• We added a permission check on our Chrome Extension for those who want to tighten up their security and privacy with our Chrome Extension v0.16.2.
• We fixed an issue where some team members in a Team would still show up as Free users.
• We fixed an issue on Windows where ⌘K doesn’t exist. Instead, we’ve mapped the search function to Ctrl-K on Windows.

Happy New Year!!! We’ve spent the last few weeks focusing on fixing 🐞🐛🐜🐝, but also had a bit of time to release one big highly requested feature…

• Video editing is here! You no longer need to have your users watch you slow-type a form in an Arcade — you can speed it up instead… up to 3x. You can also trim your videos to make the transitions just right 👌. You can do all of this inside the Arcade editor. You’ll now see a video timeline at the bottom of each video step.

• In addition to that, we’ve made some big improvements to video in general. Whenever you see a video tile in Arcade, hovering your mouse over the video will show you an instant replay.
• Team admins can now upload a logo on the Teams homepage or settings.
• In addition to these awesome features, we fixed a handful of little UI bugs in iOS and Safari.

Happy Holidays! This was a short cycle for us due to the holidays, but we have two very important features we released this week. We’re looking forward to building and sharing more Arcade goodies with you in 2023! 🎉🥂

• Tagging and filtering: Got lots of Arcades and having a hard time keeping track of them? We hear you. This week we rolled out support for tagging and filtering. Now, you can organize your Arcades using our new tagging and filtering feature. This is only available for those of you on our Teams plan.‍

• Improved video quality on Safari and iOS: We’ve made some big improvements to the video quality of our Arcades in the past few releases, and this week, we’re making sure those are seen on Safari and iOS as well. Video playback for Safari and iOS users will be a lot more stable moving forward.

Improvements

• We made some major improvements to the video quality of demo recordings. 720p for free plan users and 1080p for paid plan users.
• We now record videos at 2x the resolution regardless if your screen supports a high DPI or not.
• We made improvements to how GIFs and videos are cached for export. Now when you make a change to your published Arcade that affects the GIF or video, the new GIF or video the old versions are invalidated, and new ones will be generated when requested.
• We made a lot of enhancements to improve the stability of the demo uploads after a recording has ended.
• We replaced the cmd+delete key for deleting multiple steps with the delete key for deleting a step on the editor.
• We removed the video target component inspector from the editor to free up space.
• We refreshed the settings UIs.
• We refreshed the Teams request to join the page's UI.

Bug fixes

• We fixed a bug where the user can't add a hotspot target when copying/pasting the step
• We fixed a bug where the hotspot text is removed if you reassign the hotspot target in the same transaction.
• We fixed a bug where Cmd/Ctrl-E does not work for stopping a video recording in the extension.
• We fixed a bug where the hotspot color control was preventing users from using a custom color.
• We fixed a bug where some Arcades with overlays were adding a scrollbar when embedded.

Features

• We’ve released a new Arcade Teams trial and onboarding experience.

Improvements

• When you go through the flow builder, you can see slightly different actions inside each card — now you can learn about Command C and Command D.
• We released a new Teams UI in that you can see all the Team members inside Arcade.
• We made it clearer about our GIF and video export rules.
• Improve demo upload reliability. If your demo fails to upload, we’ll retry up to 5 times before it fails.
• The opening animation that “fades in and grows” is now disabled. Older Arcades will continue to animate in this way, but new Arcades will have a simpler fade-in.
• Be able to Cmd-K search from the preview and share page.

Bug fixes

• We fixed a bug where the hotspot text is removed if you reassign the hotspot target in the same transaction.

Features

• Send Arcades as GIFs in Gmail or Superhuman. When you paste an Arcade URL while composing an email, the Arcade Chrome Extension can replace the URL with a GIF. To use, enable this in the Arcade Chrome Extension settings.
• Multi-step copy/paste and move.

• Now you can start a Teams trial simply by visiting https://app.arcade.software/flows/team.

Bug fixes

• We fixed an issue that was preventing some iOS 16 Safari users from logging into Arcade

Improvements

• Hotspots are now animated in the new mobile viewer.
• We added the ability to disable the mobile viewer if needed. Please contact us if this is needed on your Arcade.

Bug fixes

• Embed sizes in platforms that utilize Iframely (Gitbook and most Atlassian products) are now more accurate across all sizes of Arcades.
• We fixed a UI issue with the hotspot inspector that was preventing users from changing the target of a hotspot.

Features

• Huge release! We now support mobile responsiveness. If you host your Arcade on your website or blog post, it now translates nicely when it is viewed on mobile. We made a lot of design decisions around this — we added subtitles, navigation, and a replay.

Features

• Login with Microsoft! Now you can log in with your Microsoft acct. This includes any Microsoft accounts in any organizational directory (Any Azure AD directory - Multi-tenant) and personal Microsoft accounts (e.g. Skype, Xbox)
• We launched our new navigation/progress bar UI component inside the Arcade viewer. This is only turned on by default for new Arcades you create. If you’d like to turn it on for older Arcades, there’s now a “Navigation” setting inside the Arcade settings. If you’re a Teams customer, you can turn this on by default on all the Arcades in your Teams acct by toggling on the “Navigation” setting inside the Teams appearance preferences page.

Improvements

• We’ve made UI improvements to bring consistency throughout the app, especially in the Arcade Editor.
• We’ve improved our preloading logic in the Arcade viewer to ensure speedy and reliable loading of images and videos even on bandwidth-constrained connections.
• We’ve enabled the ability to add/change your billing address and email during checkout so that the invoice contains just the right information you need when submitting your Arcade invoice to your expense department.
• We’ve added Statuspage to our Intercom Widget so you can see the status of our services directly from our support/chat widget.

Bug fixes

• We fixed an issue where the Arcade editor was causing an error that prevented users from editing their Arcade.

Features

• Search! Looking for that missing Arcade? Now you can find it easily by using the cmd-k (or ctrl-k for non-mac users). This new search feature will search the title, description, hotspots, and CTAs.

• We shipped an internal navigation/progress bar on Arcades made by Arcade. This will ship to everyone soon. Your viewers can now skip around Arcades!

Improvements

• We converted animated hotspots from SVGs to CSS, resulting in performance improvements.
• We made it faster for you to download MP4s.
• We made the engagement dropoff analytics much faster.

Bug fixes

• Numerous UI fixes/enhancements.
• Fix for “invite to collaborate” link resulting in a blank page for the invitee if they’re not logged in.
• Fix for embed height size is when embedding an Arcade on platforms that use iFramely to render the embed.
• Moving Arcades to the Team failed for customers whose team has not configured appearance preferences.
• Fixed an issue where the Arcade was sized incorrectly in the editor.
• Reassigning the hotspot’s target would cause the Arcade editor to crash.

Features

• You can now download MP4 videos of your Arcade. Much like the GIF export, we introduced a few weeks ago, you can now download an MP4 as well

Improvements

• Lots of minor UI improvements.
• Added security headers to patch up some vulnerabilities.
• Shortcut key to record an Arcade in the Chrome Extension can now be remapped from the Arcade extension’s panel.

Bug fixes

• Emojis in GIFs and MP4s were not rendering properly…it is now.
• The Arcade link expander was introducing empty space in emails composed in Superhuman. All fixed!
• GIF/MP4 generation is now more reliable.
• The Arcade Chrome Extension will now automatically expand Arcade URLs found in emails (Gmail, Superhuman, and Outlook… bonus: Github). You can turn this off if you want in the Arcade Chrome Extension settings.
• Watermark on GIFs and MP4s can now be removed just like on the Arcade itself (Pro and Team plans only).

Features

• We now allow newlines in hotspot text. If you want to share two ideas in one place, this is easier now!

Improvements

• We made the search crawler, IP tracking, and event tracking controls are now available on all plans.
• We limited the max width and height of GIFs so that portrait oriented Arcades are limited the same way as landscape oriented Arcades.
• We forced regeneration of GIFs by using CTRL/CMD-click when clicking the “Download” button.
• We limited the size of GIFs to 25mb.
• We added some Arcade card actions menu with icons.

Bug fixes

• Empty Arcades in Teams are no longer visible by users who don’t have edit access to it. This fixes a 401 error issue that users would normally get if those empty Arcades were visible.
• Publishing from the Arcade card would allow you to publish more than the limit of 3 Arcades on the free plan.
• Overlay button now syncs with the hotspot color.
• Manage billing link was missing for team admins.

Features

• View Arcades in your email (Gmail, Outlook, Superhuman, and bonus — Github).

Features

• Now you can use your clipboard to copy an image from anywhere and paste into Arcade

• Publish and share your Arcade without leaving the homepage

Improvements

• Add Team “Settings” link in user menu if the user is a team admin.

Bug fixes

• Hotspot preview on Teams preferences page shifts position during loading.
• Fix font regression in Chrome extension.
• Fix hotspot animation - the text and the hotspot are disjoined after replay.
• Arcades without a wrapper aren't centered on the stage when a background is applied.
• Cursor with name in Get Started Guide card colors are wrong.
• StartOverlay button size is not right after the button refactor.
• Prevent step copy in editor when the focus is in an input field.
• Share on Twitter button not clickable, but element inside the button is.

Features

• New email notifications related to events that happen with your Arcade when shared and viewed
• New Get Started with Arcade onboarding guides

Improvements

• You can now select multiple Arcades in “My Arcades” for deletion or moving to a team
• Updated the button styles across the app so that they’re consistent with our design language.

Bug fixes

• You can no longer preview or share an empty Arcade
• We fixed an error for Pro users that was caused when accessing the User menu in the sidebar
• When you delete a step in the editor, it should select the previous step… this is now fixed.
• We fixed a bug when typing a description in the editor, the steps in the background also change when using the arrow keys.
• We fixed an issue were the Manage Billing nav item in the user menu was missing an icon.

Features

• New recording countdown to give you more time to figure out what to demo.
• We’ve added a clearer way for you to know what plan you are on in the bottom left corner.
• We added another keyboard shortcut to resize the window: ⌘-shift-E

Improvements

• We’ve removed the sharing limit in the upper right hand corner.
• The fonts didn’t match between our Teams product and our regular Arcade product. We also made some investments in design language.
• We changed the language from “Move to personal” to “Move to My Arcades”

Bug fixes

• Sometimes hotspot’s text did not open by default. We fixed that.
• There was a month missing in the Analytics view. We added it back.
• Clicking on the “back” page in a Shared Arcade brought the user back to Teams instead of Shared Arcades page. It now directs to Shared Arcades.

This sprint was focused on a lot of polish and bug fixes after discovering a lot of unexpected papercuts while watching users make Arcades. Some users didn’t realize that there was some functionality inside Arcade, such as adding text to hotspots.

We did a “bug blitz” across the team and found a lot of things that we wanted to address.

Features

• New Chrome Extension! 🎉
• We recently hired an amazing designer and beginning to ship a lot of nice new UI in the app.
• The biggest redesign is the Chrome Extension! We now have a nicer shortcut to start and stop the demo (⌘ E).
• We moved the “Take Screenshot” and “Add Video” under advanced options as it was confusing for new users.  ****

Improvements

• You can share an Arcade right from the homepage.

• We added a shortcut of CMD/CTRL to edit an Arcade in a new tab inside the homepage.
• We added Showcase and Changelog to your profile so that you can easily get some inspiration and stay up to date on the latest.
• We changed the visuals of your paywalls to make it clearer when you are about to your publish limit.
• When you open your editing experience, we make it easy for you to start adding text to your hotspot.
• We changed the default in app text to Inter.
• When you click on preview, it opens in a new tab.

Bug fixes

• Preferences took you to Team library, so we fixed that.
• We made it easier to issue a new Teams trial.
• We made some fixes to how the hotspot inspector showed up.
• We realized some paywalls were showing up for Teams users, so we removed that.
• If you removed the browser wrapper, sometimes your height of your Arcade inside the flow builder shifted, so we fixed that.
• We added tracking to some key events in paywalls.
• There were some unexpected height changes when you click on “Fullscreen Mode.”

Features

• Our Showcase is out! We’re super excited about showing how our customers get value from our product.

• User settings — We’ve made some investments in GDPR. Control your data by preventing search crawlers from indexing published Arcades, disable IP tracking, and/or tracking on your Arcades.
• We turned on paywalls. Find out more about our pricing and packaging here.

Bug fixes

• We fixed it so that the hotspot popover appears in the wrong spot if the mouse cursor in the way.
• If you made an edit to an Arcade that is in their personal folder, and then clicked on the My Arcades button, it took you to Teams instead of Personal. We’ve fixed that.
• The browser bar was sometimes off with actual content behind it.

We now offer much faster analytics. It now imports 70x faster. If you ever want to experiment with your Arcade copy or designs, you can now learn more fast.

• Arcade has a new look and feel! Check it out here:

• We shared our pricing more publicly and started implementing in product paywalls. Find out more about our pricing here!

We introduced Remote Control for Arcades! If you want to implement something like this Slack page, we can give you an option for that. Learn more about this here.

• Viewer: Now you can see animated hotspot transitions when a viewer clicks on an Arcade.
• GDPR: We’ve made some investments in GDPR.
• Analytics: We’re making tons of investments in Analytics to make it real-time as opposed to 12 hours. If you want to be a beta customer, email us!

🎉 Announcing Arcade for Teams! 🎉 This is our multiplayer experience that we have been working hard on for the past few months. You can now:

• Discover already created Arcades and easily grab links within a single library across a team.
• Collaborate on Arcades by inviting colleagues into a demo.
• Control permissions by change access permissions anytime on a demo.
• Manage users by add, remove or monitor colleagues within an Arcade Team account.
• Set up customized branding by choosing one branding theme for your Team, and have it apply to all Arcades. Ensure that everyone stays on brand!
• Compare performance by learning about which Arcades perform the best, and build on top of successful Arcades.

Interested? Sign up via this link.

Other neat things

• Add a “See it live” overlay to your Arcade let your viewers know that there’s something interactive. This can increase engagement up to 2x!

• More discoverable settings: You can now change your chrome window or background color right within your editing experience.

• Capture is a lot easier by loading faster in a separate tab. You no longer need to wait to see your Arcade load — you will see an instant preview and use a separate tab.

Also, a nice shoutout from Google — we were told that we are now featured by the Chrome store. These badges are given to builders that “follow our technical best practices and meet a high standard of user experience and design.”

Improvements

• 🚨 Top requested improvement is out 🚨 You can now move a hotspot text box’s location. In order to do this, you simply drag and drop the text box.
• You can now copy and paste your Arcade steps! Anytime you want to move a step from another Arcade to another one, you can. It’s also useful if you want to add a CTA to an Arcade.

• Now every step automatically reassigns to your next step. No more missing targets!
• You will now get a confirmation for any step that you want to delete.
• You can now upload .mov files (from Quicktime).
• We’ve made some major performance improvements — when you use Arcade, you may notice it loads a lot faster. You will see this especially on published Arcades, on mobile, and in low bandwidth settings.
• When you build a super long Arcade, editing it has become a lot faster and easier.
• We’ve made some improvements to the Android viewer experience, during which a user can open the full screen experience.
• You will not see a scrollbar for any published Arcades.

Bug fixes

• We fixed an Analytics bug which meant that data was not showing up correctly.
• We fixed some bugs for hotspot editing inside Safari.
• We fixed the embed code for users who have video as the first step.
• We fixed some rending issues around the browser bar.
• We fixed “change hotspot color across all steps.”

Today is a big release for us: Arcade Play! This is our reimagined capture experience which makes it easier for you to record a demo, all from one button! To learn more, read our blog article.

Features

• We’re about to ship two big releases — a better capture experience, and a new product for companies who are using Arcade. Please email Caroline (caroline@arcade.software) if you want to check out the alpha version for early feedback. We’re prioritizing current users.

Improvements

• We’ve shipped an update to make it so that when you delete a step, the hotspot’s target automatically changes to the next step.
• We’ve fixed the embed code snippets.

Bug fixes

• When two videos were right after each other, the second video didn’t play.

Features

• We’ve added OEmbed preview support. When you paste your Arcade inside Slack, LinkedIn or other social media, the first step will show up as a thumbnail.

Improvements

• On our Chrome extension, we removed the video button. We’re making dramatic changes to our video capture experience but for now we are removing it as it was adding confusion.
• We’ve invested in saving branding schemes. When you edit or change the color of a hotspot, it will automatically remember for you.

Bug fixes

• Video preview inside the flow builder was not working. We’ve fixed it now.
• Assigned targets were not correlating with their step number.

• We made some significant changes to the Arcade preview and Arcade link viewer experience. When you copy your URL, you can now see a much better sized Arcade with proportional hotspots.
• This does not affect the embed experience — when you embed your Arcade inside a website or blog post, it embeds just the Arcade (like above!)
• We also made it much shaper resolution for the captures.
• We make it clearer that you can restart the Arcade in the top browser button.
• We added a Twitter “share” button right from the Arcade builder experience.