Gold Solutions Partner

Pugpig Bolt 3.3 is here!

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Team Pugpig has been busier than ever over the last 12 months developing the most comprehensive release of Pugpig Bolt and the work is now pretty much complete.

Bolt 3.3 is now live, offering a mix of edition-based (HTML, true PDF and Enhanced PDF) and live content in platform that can be extensively configured and customized to suit your needs, far beyond what any other app platform can achieve.

This move constitutes a huge step up for all our publishers, and our customer success team is poised and ready to help work through how you can take advantage of our platform's new capabilities. Take a look below to get a taste of the things we've packed into our latest and greatest release.

Some of the fab new features you'll get in Bolt 3.3

Better digital edition support than ever

We've taken all of our digital edition capabilities and super charged them:

  • Enhanced PDF allows readers to switch between true PDF and HTML views of the same content with a single tap.

  • Fully customizable storefronts and tables of contents allow you to create bespoke styling across yours apps.
  • Improved PDF rendering makes pages crisper than ever and robust download controls ensure users have what they want at their fingertips, wherever they are.
  • Better download management allows for faster access to editions and lighter network usage for readers.

All of this is fully integrated into the live news features of Bolt, allowing you to create truly universal apps that will give your readers access to everything you publish.

And all of these features are designed to work out of the box across iOS, Android and Web.

A brand new audio and podcast player

We’ve worked hard to continually iterate and improve upon Pugpig Bolt’s audio capabilities, adding more flexibility and finessing the UX.

These improvements mean you’re now able to trigger audio actions such as playing now or adding to queue from anywhere in the app, including in your content or just straight from the timeline.

This saves taps and gives you more flexibility over how users interact with your audio content. We’ve also added a new mini-player, which sits discreetly at the bottom of the app and allows you to quickly pause or step backwards through what you’re listening to, without disturbing your journey through the app.

We’re also helping expose more of the data around your audio, displaying artwork and durations in more places, alongside an optional field you can use to display, for example, the host, series or theme of the track in question.

With our podcast player, we've built a world-class solution that makes it completely viable for your Bolt app to be 100% focused on audio.

Fully customizable widgets

With Pugpig Bolt you can create custom widgets that enable you to deliver whatever content or experience you need to your readers, in any style you like. These include story carousels, video and audio widgets, event widgets, product widgets and loads more.

Dynamic Timelines allow readers to create custom timelines on the fly so that they can hone in on topics that they're most interested in. And in our next release, readers will be able to save those timelines to the app, allowing them to go back to their favourite topics at the tap of a button.

A redesigned web reader for digital editions

We've rebuilt our web reader for digital editions from the ground up and fully integrated it with both Pugpig Bolt and Pugpig Site (our hosted website platform).

The new web reader is faster, cleaner, more accessible and packs more features than ever before, enjoying near feature parity with our iOS and Android app frameworks, including support for HTML, true PDF and Enhanced PDF digital editions.

Metered paywalls

We’ve always believed that giving our customers the tools to tinker with their commercial model is incredibly helpful, and our metered paywall is the next step in that direction. Pugpig Bolt now allows you to set a number of articles that users can view for free, before being presented with your paywall. This allows them to sample the content that resonates most with them, and frees you from having to manage a list of “free” content. We’ve even included a little UI to keep users informed and drive them to subscribe. It’s a simple, but effective, tool, and one we have big plans to expand upon soon.

Get your own customized Pugpig demo app

A Publish or Bolt demo app gives you a fully working app that will allow you to properly visualize what Pugpig could do for your brand. It’s quick and easy to do, and it can be extremely useful. It couldn’t be easier:

We start by having a quick call with you to establish the details of the demo app.

You then give us some sample content and branding assets in a pre-agreed format.

We get busy building the PoC for you — we usually turn it around within a week.

Once ready, we take you through the PoC on a call and then give you access to download and distribute it to your team.

Benefits

  • You get your own Pugpig prototype app with your own content, fonts and branding.
  • You get to really see the product works and test out all the features.
  • You can use the app to trigger ideas around how best to organize your content and UX.
  • You get a good sense of what it’s like working with the Pugpig team.
  • You can share the app with a select group (your team, advertisers, research groups) to get feedback and buy-in.
  • And you’ve taken your first step to launching your app.

Contact info@pugpig for more information!