Archive

Prey Control Panel, on crack

Here’s a brief list of changes we’ve made to the Prey Control Panel, which hopefully will make it easier for you to manage Prey and keep an eye on what’s going on with your stuff.

August 26, 2010

It's been over a year since we launched the Control Panel and it was about time we made some changes. During the past months we've been noticing which things work and which needed to be looked at, thanks to the constant feedback we've received from you guys.

So, first of all, thanks everyone!

Here's a brief list of changes we've made to the Prey Control Panel, which hopefully will make it easier for you to manage Prey and keep an eye on what's going on with your stuff.

Here we go.

To the left, not to the right

This is probably the first thing you'll notice when visiting the new version of the Panel. We used to align everything to the right -- honestly, out of no reason in particular -- and though it looked good, that didn't necessarily mean it also worked good. We were constantly battling with alignments, keeping stuff into position and, you know, trying to make the thing look not-so-awful in IE.

So we decided to turn things around and follow the logical way of reading, which makes it work a bit better while also keeping the structure more in place.

New grid view

This is a cool new feature. You can now watch your devices in grid mode in addition to the traditional list, which not only lets you capture them all in a glance, but also allows you to filter and sort themeither by their status or their names, among other things.

This feature is currently disabled for Internet Explorer as the rendering speed is really lousy (sorry guys) and we still need to figure out how to make it work better. Everyone else will enjoy it, as it works really good.

Tabs for keeping better tabs

First of all, we separated the different sections of the device management page into tabs, so you can find much faster what you're looking for. We also renamed the "Update" button to "Save changes" as it makes much more sense, and we also added a second one at the top so you don't need to scroll the whole way down to apply your new settings.

SSL support, at last

As promised, all forms which handle passwords on the Control Panel are processed through SSL (e.g. login, signup, profile). So, having that the signups from the installers are now also handled through SSL, this means your user info will never again fly in the wild. This makes us much more comfortable when logging in and out of the Panel and probably you will, too.

No more language switching

Yes, it's gone. We finally seemed to catch the inglorious bugstard that was causing the Control Panel to randomly switch to a different language without your request -- although it was quite a funny bug in our opinion, hehe. The Control Panel will now also check your browser's HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE header so in most cases your language will be automatically selected if there's a localization available.

From our tests the bug is no longer there, but please let us know if you see any funny behaviour again.

Different colors for buttons

Small one but important nevertheless. Some of you told us sometimes you'd accidentally remove a device when you actually wanted to add a new one, because of the fact all the buttons were orange. Well, not anymore.

And that's about it! Next time you log in you'll see all these changes (hit Ctrl+R to reload the files in case it looks weird), and you'll also notice small differences here and there that hopefully will make your life easier.

We hope you like the new look of Prey's Control Panel and hope it works for you as it works for us. Happy hunting!

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