We have a long list of features we want to put into Wixie; years’ worth of work to do it all. Mostly the features come from user requests. Features move up and down the list based on how often we hear the request. But sometimes, things just around based on opportunity.  Today we added some requested features to our usage reporting, not because it was the most requested feature, but because the opportunity presented itself. 

If you don’t use Wixie in Chrome on Windows, or your classroom has gone green and you don’t do a lot of printing, then you haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary. But, if you tried to print from Wixie on Windows in Chrome sometime in the last week then you probably noticed all you got was a big grey box.

Searching the Wixie Library for a single letter or number used to give either no results or WAY to many results. We have updated the search algorithm to give users much better results when searching for one or two characters. Now, when you search for the letter A for example, you will see letters, blocks, and symbols that match the letter A.

With the latest update to the Wixie app for Android and iPad, the account log in procedure has been changed.

We updated Wixie this weekend and gave lots of new sharing options to teachers. All teachers can now share projects with other teachers in their school by adding activities to their school activity folder. Teachers can also easily share their projects by email, Facebook, and Twitter.

As students head back for the new school year, we are seeing the number of users on Wixie double over last year.

For the new school year, we have added two new methods for doing a single sign-on with Wixie. SAML and Clever Instant Login are now available as options to schools and districts that want to be able to create a single sign-on for their students.

One of the hard things about developing software is that sometimes you release an update that had a lot of hard work go into it, but there really isn’t anything to “show” for it. There are a lot of really good, important changes, but nothing like a new feature you can point to that gets people excited about using it.

Today we released just such an update. There are a lot of cool changes, necessary changes, but not a lot to write home about.

Full disclosure: My 9 year old son can’t type. Actually, he has no interest in technology unless it is playing Clash of Clans. He would rather be playing soccer. He can juggle a soccer ball 1,194 times without stopping but it takes him 10 minutes to type a simple sentence (a minute of typing and 9 minutes of groaning). Because he types very slowly, he isn’t really interested, and he would rather be outside running around, he gets frustrated easily when asked to do things that involve typing. After watching him fatfinger his Wixie password five or six times and getting frustrated, I decided he really needs to be able to see whether he is typing in his password correctly. Since his password is iain111 (I made that up, but it is something just as easy) every kid in his class knows every other kid’s password. So there really wasn’t much of a security concern; just make it easier to get the password entered correctly the first time.

We like to keep little enhancements to Wixie rolling out as often as we can. Often times these updates are just little additions to make life easier for some subset of our users. This update offers a little something for account admins and activity publishers.