As some of you know over the past year or so we’ve been naming our versions of Frog after cool people from history. The next version of Frog is called the Whittle release, after Sir Frank Whittle.
Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, OM, KBE, CB, FRS, Hon FRAeS
(1 June 1907 – 9 August 1996) was an English Royal Air Force (RAF) engineer air officer.
He is credited with single handedly inventing the turbojet engine.
Our last release was in July of this year, and you should see how much we’ve done since then! We have more than 70 people in our software development team, and for the last couple of years they’ve spent much of their time putting the “foundations” in to Frog. While I won’t bore you with the details, as many of you know Frog’s product design mentality, what you can see on the surface is only a fraction of what’s possible once you understand what’s going on underneath the skin (two cars might look the same from the outside, but under the skin one happens to be a World Rally Car, while the other might just be a normal road car, with an oil leak… ;0)
All this inner magic is now mostly completed, and this means that we’ve now started to be able to use the huge development resources we have to focus entirely on things you can see rather than the hidden magic under the hood. The Whittle release will give you an idea of just how far forward we can go now in a short space of time. As you can tell, I’m dead excited about the speed and momentum that Frog have at the moment!
I’ll drop a few screenshots on here over the coming days, but here’s a small taster:
- completely rebuilt assignment manager (for issuing work, marking work, communicating with the students and giving formative feedback)
- a brand new mark book (for assessing performance and progress)
- new apps in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store (giving you access to EVERYTHING in the Frog system from tablet devices)
- a brand new Frog Snap mobile application for both iOS and Android devices (now records video, allows live editing of images, and also provides tools for annotating feedback on work instantly)
- huge improvements to the text widget in the site editor (allowing you to create sophisticated web sites, or even build your own learning platform within a site!)
- massive improvements to sites (particularly around using sites as publicly facing websites and portals)
- huge improvements to Frog Drive (enabling shared workspaces, collaboration, a funky new interface and loads more)
- ability to mass import data from other systems (zip up your existing document structure and fire it straight in to Frog in one go!)
- Whole new Frog Parent product now available for Frog Learn
- Whole new Frog Secure Gateway product now available for Frog Learn
- And the FDP (Frog Developer Platform) has finally been launched and training has started, enabling you to get under the hood of Frog yourself and bend it and shape it any way that you want, including integrating or even building your own applications and mobile apps!
Is that everything? Nope…there’s loads more stuff in this release
Is this what we’ll be showing at the Bett show? Nah, there’ll be another release nearing completion by then!
Am I excited at how quickly things are being developed right now? Damn right ! Are you?
Gareth.Frog 