Welcome Screen and New Mac App
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📆 Jan 27th 2021 - 3min read
Today we are introducing the latest major update for our Hinfo service, bring us to Version 2.7.0.
With this update we wanted to focus on 3 primary areas.
- Support for a personalized Welcome Screen after guests select your property,
- Expanding the range of devices and platforms that can access our Hinfo service and
- Other general improvements.
Welcome Screen
Every property can now provide a personalized message and image to include on a dedicated screen, that is immediately viewable after guests select your property.
You can use this screen to highlight the few most important pieces of information to start with, that you may mention during check-in.
This screen will only appear when guests enter your property for the first time and not everytime your guests use Hinfo during their stay.
New Devices and Platforms - Mac App and Android Foldables
Today's update is also taking a major step forward when it comes to increasing the number of ways guests can access Hinfo and new device form factors that are fully supported.
Mac App - Available from macOS App Store
We have upgraded our iPhone and iPad app to now work on the Mac, and we did not just tick a checkbox to support it and call it a day.
Here are all of the areas we have catered for in this initial Mac app release:
- Fully scalable and resizable window (not every Mac developer is doing this),
- New Persistent Side Menu with options to jump to the main sections of the app and is personalized for each property
- Menu Bar support with options to jump to each section
- Touch Bar support with options for the main 4 tabs and
- Support downloading full size images by default given the bigger and higher resolution displays.
During this same process, we have also brought the persistent side menu to the iPad, which presents more options then just the main 4 tabs before to jump to each section from anywhere.
Android Foldables
A new trend with consumer portable devices today, is the world of foldables on Android.
If we take the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 with a tall smartphone screen on the outside and a mini tablet screen on the inside when you unfold it, we now support the continuity of switching between one screen and the other, providing a persistent experience regardless of which screen or orientation they wish to use on devices like these.
Foldables are very likely to gain some of the smartphone and tablet market share long term, even if it is not anywhere near the majority, so it pays to support it.
General Improvements
And finally, like any other update, we also have several general improvements to the app.
In this release we also included:
- Support for bold, italic and underline within all details and hours fields,
- Larger text size for property search results on iPad and Mac,
- Further optimizations to Apple app to reduce the download and install size on average by 40% (e.g. iPhone X install size was 17.1MB now 12.4MB),
- Improvements to displaying all large images in the correct aspect ratio and
- Other minor bug fixes and minor visual improvements.
Retiring iOS 10 Support
Whilst we were developing this new update for iPhone, iPad and Mac, we choose to drop supported for iOS 10.
We decided to do this for the following reasons:
- Next to no one running iOS 10 on their iPhone or iPad is downloading our app, particularly if it makes up only 1.5% of all iPhone and iPad users worldwide.
- Dropping iOS 10 contributes to reducing the app download and install size for all Apple users running newer software.
- For development reasons, we needed iOS 11 to be the new minimum, in-order to support the persistent side menu for iPad and Mac users, along with offering a Mac app in general.
All of this is available in our Version 2.7.0 update for guests to download now and all is included in the cost of the Hinfo membership.
