In this article, you'll find a list of our most impactful new features and enhancements that we have released this month.

Don't worry, for more significant enhancements, you can still check out our blog, as well as read our newsletter. If you have questions about these items, don't hesitate to contact our support team.

The highly visual nature of Ziflow’s Dashboard 2.0 has made clickable thumbnail images an essential way to navigate and identify active and archived projects. But some viewers may find that the default setting that crops the proof to fit within the thumbnail box too limiting. With this week’s release, Ziflow has introduced a new system-wide setting— Thumbnails aspect ratio —with two options to cater to your team’s viewing preferences:

Crop to Fit: This option adjusts the thumbnail images to fill the allocated thumbnail space completely, ensuring a uniform appearance across your dashboard. This is the current default behavior within Ziflow’s updated Dashboard.

Original Aspect Ratio: If your team prefers to see the entirety of the proof within the thumbnail image, select this option to maintain the original aspect ratio of your assets, ensuring that live website thumbnails and other content are easily recognizable at a glance.

Note: this setting will only apply to a proof’s thumbnail image in Ziflow’s Dashboard; images in the “more proofs to review” modal, email notifications and hourly digests, and other areas of the software where thumbnails are displayed will retain the “crop to fit” behavior.

A review process with multiple commenters who haven’t uploaded an avatar picture can sometimes be challenging—when each reviewer has the same grey circle next to their names, it can be difficult to quickly determine which commenter is which. With this release, we’ve added a unique color to any user’s avatar that has not been updated to include an image, making it easier to distinguish between reviewers at a glance.

Users who have yet to specify an avatar will be assigned a randomly generated color, making it significantly easier to tell who’s who at a glance. The color assigned to a user will remain consistent for each tenant they are part of, ensuring easy identification across different projects and discussions.

Note: This is stage one of a two-part update. User avatars in email notifications and hourly digests, Ziflow’s Dashboard and other areas where avatars are displayed will retain the “grey circle” behavior. An upcoming feature release will standardize the color of an avatar across all other aspects of the software.

Adding a written brief to a proof is a commonly used feature within Ziflow, and the rich text editor makes it easy for creators to add context to their reviews. The checkbox in the brief creator that forces links to be opened in a new tab was previously set to “off”, so when a user clicked on a URL in a brief in Ziflow’s Viewer that link would open in the same tab by default.

With this release, we've changed the default state of the checkbox to “on”: meaning that clickable links in proof briefs will now open in a new tab unless the box is deselected during brief creation.

Note: This change applies to links embedded using the proof brief editor from this point forward, and is not retroactively applied to existing proofs. Links created in proof briefs prior to this update will retain their original behavior and will not automatically open in a new tab. We recommend updating critical links in ongoing projects to utilize this new functionality.

Ziflow is committed to delivering a powerful platform for all our users. As part of this commitment, all users on our legacy “Personal” plan have been migrated to the updated Free plan, which has increased limits on users, storage, and usage. The Free plan includes:

The new Free plan also introduces access limits on proofs, now restricted to 60 days. Your proofs will still be visible, but proofs older than 60 days will be “disabled” within the next 30 days and cannot be edited in the Dashboard, nor viewed in Proof Viewer. Files are still available for download, and you will regain access to these proofs if you upgrade to any of Ziflow’s paid plans.

We hope these expanded limits on the new free plan provide you more flexibility using Ziflow. Should you have any questions or require further clarification, please don't hesitate to contact our support team.