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Video Review This is huge and we’re probably most excited about this new addition. Now in the new Cage, you can share, collaborate, review, and approve video. Perfect for agencies doing broadcast and motion graphics, but also for all the studios that work on games, vfx, animation, and 3D.  From a UX perspective, we wanted the experience of reviewing video to be almost the same as an image. Knowing we had to handle a few things differently (and after working with a few studios on the best solution), we built all the interaction around the timeline. Here’s a closer look at the Video Review:  Notes can be made on a frame-by-frame basis for the video and you’ll be using the same notes interface you’re using throughout Cage to make notes, tasks, etc.  Tasks can be seamlessly made just like you would make them on images. Timeline functionality. In the timeline, you’ll see that the playhead has a “+” to denote “add”. You can click the video or the playhead, at which time the video pauses and gives you the option to make a note. Also in the timeline, you’ll see the option to quickly move between notes (think of this like fast forward, but to skip to the next note). And we have all the other settings like volume, full screen, etc. Modern web technology. We’ve built everything for this using HTML5 (and CSS, Javascript, etc)…and we’ve spent a considerable amount of time on the new compression and encoding algorithm so that your quality is super high, and the playback is super fast (playback of the video on mobile is pretty nice too). There’s also another view (much like this for images) and we’ll show that to you guys too. We’re working on some pretty handy little tools for video for version 2, so stay tuned for some continual improvements and enhancements. We’re excited about the new Cage, and really excited about the addition of video. Enjoy! The video used above is from our recent commercial shoot.Special thanks for our friends at Staplegun for their generosity and help.
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Video Review

This is huge and we’re probably most excited about this new addition. Now in the new Cage, you can share, collaborate, review, and approve video. Perfect for agencies doing broadcast and motion graphics, but also for all the studios that work on games, vfx, animation, and 3D. 

From a UX perspective, we wanted the experience of reviewing video to be almost the same as an image. Knowing we had to handle a few things differently (and after working with a few studios on the best solution), we built all the interaction around the timeline. Here’s a closer look at the Video Review: 

  1. Notes can be made on a frame-by-frame basis for the video and you’ll be using the same notes interface you’re using throughout Cage to make notes, tasks, etc. 
  2. Tasks can be seamlessly made just like you would make them on images.
  3. Timeline functionality. In the timeline, you’ll see that the playhead has a “+” to denote “add”. You can click the video or the playhead, at which time the video pauses and gives you the option to make a note. Also in the timeline, you’ll see the option to quickly move between notes (think of this like fast forward, but to skip to the next note). And we have all the other settings like volume, full screen, etc.
  4. Modern web technology. We’ve built everything for this using HTML5 (and CSS, Javascript, etc)…and we’ve spent a considerable amount of time on the new compression and encoding algorithm so that your quality is super high, and the playback is super fast (playback of the video on mobile is pretty nice too).

There’s also another view (much like this for images) and we’ll show that to you guys too. We’re working on some pretty handy little tools for video for version 2, so stay tuned for some continual improvements and enhancements. We’re excited about the new Cage, and really excited about the addition of video. Enjoy!

The video used above is from our recent commercial shoot.Special thanks for our friends at Staplegun for their generosity and help.

Task List Much like our alternate view for notes that we just showed in a previous post, we wanted to carry the idea of giving our community two options in viewing tasks in Cage. You can view all your tasks in the Calendar view (more visual, grid style) or you can view them in a list view (where it’s all about the content. Here’s why we love the Task List view: We pull a thumbnail of the visual you’re working on so that you have context (you can click to enlarge). Smart filters all you to reorganize your tasks based on due dates, project, and person. You can create new tasks directly in this view (that will update everywhere). The interaction is really nice (as you mark each task for done, it animates down to the bottom, do you can still see what you completed. When you click “MORE INFO”, a modal opens that provides the designer all the information they might need. It is a copy of the discussion that took place on the visual, shows the highlighted area that was drawn on the image, all the people/times all associated with it, and when the task was create and by who. This way, if you’re left wondering, “what does that mean”, you’ll get clarity within seconds. Context, clarity, and easy communication is what this new version of Cage is all about. That’s the Task List in Cage. We’re excited about this and are using it all the time. We think you’ll find it extremely useful. Again, if you’re interested in getting involved in the early access, let us know (hello [at] cageapp.com)
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Task List

Much like our alternate view for notes that we just showed in a previous post, we wanted to carry the idea of giving our community two options in viewing tasks in Cage. You can view all your tasks in the Calendar view (more visual, grid style) or you can view them in a list view (where it’s all about the content. Here’s why we love the Task List view:

  1. We pull a thumbnail of the visual you’re working on so that you have context (you can click to enlarge).
  2. Smart filters all you to reorganize your tasks based on due dates, project, and person.
  3. You can create new tasks directly in this view (that will update everywhere).
  4. The interaction is really nice (as you mark each task for done, it animates down to the bottom, do you can still see what you completed.
  5. When you click “MORE INFO”, a modal opens that provides the designer all the information they might need. It is a copy of the discussion that took place on the visual, shows the highlighted area that was drawn on the image, all the people/times all associated with it, and when the task was create and by who. This way, if you’re left wondering, “what does that mean”, you’ll get clarity within seconds. Context, clarity, and easy communication is what this new version of Cage is all about.

That’s the Task List in Cage. We’re excited about this and are using it all the time. We think you’ll find it extremely useful. Again, if you’re interested in getting involved in the early access, let us know (hello [at] cageapp.com)

Note List With the current version of Cage, you only see and create notes on the actual image you’re viewing. We think this is great and we love the visual approach to providing more context to what you’re discussing. But that’s not for everyone and sometimes you just want to see the discussion. Often times (especially during those marathon discussions with your team or clients) people just want to have the discussion and the visuals take back seat, we know we this from our won experiences too. So we decided to build two views for you to toggle between (this is your preference, use which ever you prefer). You can still see and make notes directly on top of the work, but if you prefer having the discussion in a forum that’s more about the content and less about the visuals (we keep referring to “visuals” cause we have a surprise for you all), you can use the Note List. Here’s what you’ll see: Contextual discussions. Directly on this page, you’ll see the visual you’re working on to your right and all the discussions and different notes on the left. From here you can still create notes and tasks (both update in each view, so it doesn’t matter which one you use). Interactive feedback. As you’re interacting with a discussion, it highlights the area of the visual where the note was drawn and we also show a small thumbnail that you can click to see a larger view the highlighted section of the work. As you scroll down the page, the visuals follow you to each section you’re working on. That’s the Note List inside Cage, a simple way to interact with your team and clients around creative work. A special thank you goes out to Foundry Collective and Paul and Scott for submitting some of their work to us for inclusion in the new demos we’re doing. You can see more of their work at Foundry Collective (great guys, who happen to have native roots in Oklahoma). More to come soon.
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Note List

With the current version of Cage, you only see and create notes on the actual image you’re viewing. We think this is great and we love the visual approach to providing more context to what you’re discussing. But that’s not for everyone and sometimes you just want to see the discussion. Often times (especially during those marathon discussions with your team or clients) people just want to have the discussion and the visuals take back seat, we know we this from our won experiences too. So we decided to build two views for you to toggle between (this is your preference, use which ever you prefer). You can still see and make notes directly on top of the work, but if you prefer having the discussion in a forum that’s more about the content and less about the visuals (we keep referring to “visuals” cause we have a surprise for you all), you can use the Note List. Here’s what you’ll see:

  1. Contextual discussions. Directly on this page, you’ll see the visual you’re working on to your right and all the discussions and different notes on the left. From here you can still create notes and tasks (both update in each view, so it doesn’t matter which one you use).
  2. Interactive feedback. As you’re interacting with a discussion, it highlights the area of the visual where the note was drawn and we also show a small thumbnail that you can click to see a larger view the highlighted section of the work. As you scroll down the page, the visuals follow you to each section you’re working on.

That’s the Note List inside Cage, a simple way to interact with your team and clients around creative work. A special thank you goes out to Foundry Collective and Paul and Scott for submitting some of their work to us for inclusion in the new demos we’re doing. You can see more of their work at Foundry Collective (great guys, who happen to have native roots in Oklahoma). More to come soon.

Address Book We hinted at this feature in an earlier sneak peek, but again, this is something we thought was absolutely needed for one big reason…a better experience. We personally hated having to copy and paste links and bounce in and out of Cage and email, and wanted to make it a seamless experience (as it should be). In creating a better experience, one that’s simple, easy, and useful, we built an internal Address Book in Cage. A central place to add contacts, edit contacts, send/resend invites to a project, and a way to track if they have logged in and when. Now when you share a project (you’ll see how easy that is soon too), it’s as easy as checking who gets access…all in Cage. Inside this section, you’ll see: A list of all your contacts in Cage (client or team) and their email/company. A quick and easy way to edit/delete and also add more contacts. A way to see if your client ever logged in or got the link. Simple, straight-forward, and useful. This is going to make life so much easier for you all and is going to give you a better experience using Cage in production. Thanks and enjoy…more to come soon (don’t worry, we’re almost done with sneak peeks and will be able to give you all access soon). Thank you all for the awesome emails, we’re excited too.
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Address Book

We hinted at this feature in an earlier sneak peek, but again, this is something we thought was absolutely needed for one big reason…a better experience. We personally hated having to copy and paste links and bounce in and out of Cage and email, and wanted to make it a seamless experience (as it should be). In creating a better experience, one that’s simple, easy, and useful, we built an internal Address Book in Cage. A central place to add contacts, edit contacts, send/resend invites to a project, and a way to track if they have logged in and when. Now when you share a project (you’ll see how easy that is soon too), it’s as easy as checking who gets access…all in Cage. Inside this section, you’ll see:

  1. A list of all your contacts in Cage (client or team) and their email/company.
  2. A quick and easy way to edit/delete and also add more contacts.
  3. A way to see if your client ever logged in or got the link.

Simple, straight-forward, and useful. This is going to make life so much easier for you all and is going to give you a better experience using Cage in production. Thanks and enjoy…more to come soon (don’t worry, we’re almost done with sneak peeks and will be able to give you all access soon). Thank you all for the awesome emails, we’re excited too.

Calendar & Tasks This is one the new features we’re most excited about. For a long time now, we always talked about adding a Calendar inside Cage to help designers stay on track and manage their projects, deliverables, revisions, and approvals. Now, you have all that and more! Here’s a quick breakdown of the Calendar in the new Cage: Alerts. We alert you once you’re logged in if you have any overdue tasks. If you click “view all”, a nice little interaction happens and you’ll be able to see more details and also check them as done. Speaking of alerts…we’ve also added email notifications (another big request). Calendar Views. You can see the Calendar in a monthly (more visual) view or you can see your tasks in a list view (which all have filters so you can sort them by Dates, Project, Overdue, and by Person). Tasks. You can quickly add tasks directly in this view. You can see some general details about tasks in the Calendar and if you hover over one, you can get a detailed look at the task. In the task detail, we provide the file that task is associated with, along with some metadata to provide more context (Client, Project, File Name, number of Tasks, number of Unread Notes). You can check tasks as done directly in this view too. All tasks in Cage are associated with projects and files. We’re not a general task or project management system tool, we simply built a task management tool for creative work to make collaboration in Cage even easier. This feature is extremely useful and we’ve kept it as simple as possible so that it’s easy to use (the reaction so far has been amazing). Stay tuned for more!
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Calendar & Tasks

This is one the new features we’re most excited about. For a long time now, we always talked about adding a Calendar inside Cage to help designers stay on track and manage their projects, deliverables, revisions, and approvals. Now, you have all that and more! Here’s a quick breakdown of the Calendar in the new Cage:

  1. Alerts. We alert you once you’re logged in if you have any overdue tasks. If you click “view all”, a nice little interaction happens and you’ll be able to see more details and also check them as done. Speaking of alerts…we’ve also added email notifications (another big request).
  2. Calendar Views. You can see the Calendar in a monthly (more visual) view or you can see your tasks in a list view (which all have filters so you can sort them by Dates, Project, Overdue, and by Person).
  3. Tasks. You can quickly add tasks directly in this view. You can see some general details about tasks in the Calendar and if you hover over one, you can get a detailed look at the task. In the task detail, we provide the file that task is associated with, along with some metadata to provide more context (Client, Project, File Name, number of Tasks, number of Unread Notes). You can check tasks as done directly in this view too.

All tasks in Cage are associated with projects and files. We’re not a general task or project management system tool, we simply built a task management tool for creative work to make collaboration in Cage even easier. This feature is extremely useful and we’ve kept it as simple as possible so that it’s easy to use (the reaction so far has been amazing). Stay tuned for more!

Archives Out with the old…in with the new. Ever wanted to put a project on the back-burner or archive it for awhile but weren’t able to in Cage? Now you can archive projects as they are completed and you can reactivate projects whenever you like. A really handy feature, especially when you’re working with clients that have a tendency to make last minute changes or even after something has already been approved. Enjoy!
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Archives

Out with the old…in with the new. Ever wanted to put a project on the back-burner or archive it for awhile but weren’t able to in Cage? Now you can archive projects as they are completed and you can reactivate projects whenever you like. A really handy feature, especially when you’re working with clients that have a tendency to make last minute changes or even after something has already been approved. Enjoy!

New Projects Here’s a quick look at the new “Add New Project” modal inside Cage. You can see this has been heavily revamped to allow for some of the new functionality we’ve built. Here’s a quick breakdown: Projects now have more organization and structure. One of the most requested features in the old version was “sets” or “folders”, so we’ve built that. Now a Client (like “Acme Corp” in the screen shot above) can have multiple projects within it. We like to stay organized…this is going to make it easy for you to stay organized too.  Client contacts are now stored directly inside Cage (more on this soon). This now makes it easier to share and set permissions to projects where you are working with multiple decision-makers and contacts at one company. A nice little addition is that as you start to type the name of the Client, we automatically populate any contacts that are associated with that Client. You can add more from this section too (in case you’ve missed someone). Drag and Drop Upload. Hands down the biggest complaint with the old version of Cage was the inability to upload multiple images at once. Uploading one by one was tedious and since we were making bulk upload available, we also opted to make life even easier with the ability to drag and drop files directly into Cage.  We listened and built a better experience. Team permissions are not only available now, but we’ve completely revamped the entire user system and the on-boarding experience (more on this soon). We automatically pull all your team(s) into the New Project Modal since this is where it makes most sense to check who gets access and who doesn’t. More to come and hope you all enjoy. If you’re interested in early-beta access, be sure to email us directly at hello [at] cagepp.com. We’re adding more to our internal test team each week.
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New Projects

Here’s a quick look at the new “Add New Project” modal inside Cage. You can see this has been heavily revamped to allow for some of the new functionality we’ve built. Here’s a quick breakdown:

  1. Projects now have more organization and structure. One of the most requested features in the old version was “sets” or “folders”, so we’ve built that. Now a Client (like “Acme Corp” in the screen shot above) can have multiple projects within it. We like to stay organized…this is going to make it easy for you to stay organized too. 
  2. Client contacts are now stored directly inside Cage (more on this soon). This now makes it easier to share and set permissions to projects where you are working with multiple decision-makers and contacts at one company. A nice little addition is that as you start to type the name of the Client, we automatically populate any contacts that are associated with that Client. You can add more from this section too (in case you’ve missed someone).
  3. Drag and Drop Upload. Hands down the biggest complaint with the old version of Cage was the inability to upload multiple images at once. Uploading one by one was tedious and since we were making bulk upload available, we also opted to make life even easier with the ability to drag and drop files directly into Cage.  We listened and built a better experience.
  4. Team permissions are not only available now, but we’ve completely revamped the entire user system and the on-boarding experience (more on this soon). We automatically pull all your team(s) into the New Project Modal since this is where it makes most sense to check who gets access and who doesn’t.

More to come and hope you all enjoy. If you’re interested in early-beta access, be sure to email us directly at hello [at] cagepp.com. We’re adding more to our internal test team each week.

Notes, Tasks, and So Much More We’ve gotten an overwhelming response to the upcoming release of Cage. Lots of you have asked about what we’ll have in the new version here’s the first of several sneak peeks at the new Cage.  There’s a lot of new features in just the Notes Modal, so here we go (let’s start with the biggest addition…TASKS). Cage now has task management. Directly from the notes modal, you can switch effortlessly from adding a Note, to adding a Task. That Task can be assigned to someone on your team (or you) and can have a due date associated with it. Once a task is added or assigned, the user gets a notification via email and in the app (yep, we’ve added notifications too). Even better, we give you the option to let your clients do some of the data entry for you and create tasks for changes that need to be made (since project management can be tedius and time-comsuming, this lets you focus on the work and those revisions…oh yea, we’ve got that too covered too). Cage now gives you the ability to upload a “mini-mockup” directly in the thread. This lets you see more context to what a change might be like and/or provide you the ability to offer critique and suggestions if you’re working with your peers. We provide administrative options for you so that you can delete, hide, and even email a specific person in the threaded conversation. That’s just some of the new things we’ve built (we promise, there’s a ton more). Stay tuned for more sneak peeks. Email us (hello@cageapp.com if you’d like early access). Special kudos to the fine folks at Digital-Tutors. They provided us with some amazing artwork to use throughout our sneak peeks and demos. 
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Notes, Tasks, and So Much More

We’ve gotten an overwhelming response to the upcoming release of Cage. Lots of you have asked about what we’ll have in the new version here’s the first of several sneak peeks at the new Cage. 

There’s a lot of new features in just the Notes Modal, so here we go (let’s start with the biggest addition…TASKS).

  1. Cage now has task management. Directly from the notes modal, you can switch effortlessly from adding a Note, to adding a Task. That Task can be assigned to someone on your team (or you) and can have a due date associated with it. Once a task is added or assigned, the user gets a notification via email and in the app (yep, we’ve added notifications too). Even better, we give you the option to let your clients do some of the data entry for you and create tasks for changes that need to be made (since project management can be tedius and time-comsuming, this lets you focus on the work and those revisions…oh yea, we’ve got that too covered too).
  2. Cage now gives you the ability to upload a “mini-mockup” directly in the thread. This lets you see more context to what a change might be like and/or provide you the ability to offer critique and suggestions if you’re working with your peers.
  3. We provide administrative options for you so that you can delete, hide, and even email a specific person in the threaded conversation.

That’s just some of the new things we’ve built (we promise, there’s a ton more). Stay tuned for more sneak peeks. Email us (hello@cageapp.com if you’d like early access).

Special kudos to the fine folks at Digital-Tutors. They provided us with some amazing artwork to use throughout our sneak peeks and demos. 

New Custom Colors Our team has been hard at work and judging from the awesome response we’re getting in both signups and user emails telling us how much they like the app; we’re onto something!  Our development cycle is an agile, quick release one, so expect lots of small updates in addition to the big major releases. This new feature was one that was requested and that we also felt would be useful during the presentation phase, so we spent a day or two building it and testing it….and now it’s live. You can now pick custom colors for both notes (sometimes our default just might not cut it) and also background colors (instead of the transparency or black options we had). Just a little customization so that you can make CAGE, yours. Enjoy!
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New Custom Colors

Our team has been hard at work and judging from the awesome response we’re getting in both signups and user emails telling us how much they like the app; we’re onto something! 

Our development cycle is an agile, quick release one, so expect lots of small updates in addition to the big major releases. This new feature was one that was requested and that we also felt would be useful during the presentation phase, so we spent a day or two building it and testing it….and now it’s live. You can now pick custom colors for both notes (sometimes our default just might not cut it) and also background colors (instead of the transparency or black options we had).

Just a little customization so that you can make CAGE, yours. Enjoy!

We’re also honored to be recently featured in .NET Magazine as “one of the hottest beta sites on the web”. While we think what we’re building is pretty awesome, it’s great knowing others feel the same way. Thank you for featuring us, we”re humbled and flattered.
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We’re also honored to be recently featured in .NET Magazine as “one of the hottest beta sites on the web”. While we think what we’re building is pretty awesome, it’s great knowing others feel the same way. Thank you for featuring us, we”re humbled and flattered.

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