Jumpchart Has a New Reordering Function!
We released a brand new version of the reordering function on Jumpchart this morning. A lot of users requested an improved version of this feature — as the old one could get a bit confusing on larger projects — and we think we’ve nailed it with this one. As a base for the code, we used the NestedSortable library for jQuery. The new function works perfectly on all major browsers, but if your project has more than 100 pages, Safari for the Mac or Google Chrome for Windows offer the best performance.
Load times were one of the major problems we faced during the implementation of the new feature. In order to make the library work correctly, we saw a 40% increase in size of our Javascript files. Besides having bigger files, we also had too many fragmented files — this meant a lot of independent HTTP requests per page loaded, which is never good for performance.
The solution we came up with for both of these problems was to write a packer that would automatically compile all Javascript files necessary for the app to run inside one single file (which we creatively call full.js). That would solve the problem with the multiple HTTP requests, but not quite the filesize one. In order to fix that problem, we used a method called minification, which basically consists of removing unnecessary code from the source code in order to save space (we used the JSMin library for this purpose).
As a result, we ended up reducing 20% of the filesize problem, and load times are roughly 50% shorter.
We hope you guys enjoy the new feature and the snappiness.
