When you start the Glubble Kids Browser you will now see a login screen first. Each child can access his personal environment by clicking on his profile picture. We will add the option to set a password per child in the near future.

The new Glubble kids browser login screen

The Glubble Kids browser will open with a new look and new themes.

The new Glubble kids browser

The toolbar has been simplified and now contains several new options. Next to the home page button there is the new Collections button. It allows direct access all Glubble website collections.

Glubble world collections

The star button is used to set a favorite web site and add it to your home page. There is now also a preference button, and if you click that, you can set new themes for the Kids Browser. Here you see our new Sharks theme.

New Glubble kids themes: sharks

And this is our new Crayon theme. We will be adding more themes in the near future.

New Glubble kids themes: Crayon

There is now a minimize button, that temporarily minimizes the browser. And the new logout button closes the current kids page and re-opens the Glubble kids browser login screen again. From there you can select another child profile, close the browser, or unlock to parents mode again.

The kids page contains all your child favorite web sites, the family message wall and access to family photos and the Glubble Gotcha’s.

The new Glubble kids home page

This is the first major improvement to the Kids browser. We will continue to add new features in the coming weeks, and we hope you will enjoy the upgrade. As always, you can download the latest version here: www.glubble.com/download

The Glubble iPhone app

You can now download it and start uploading photos to your Family Timeline, wherever you are.

Click here to download the free Glubble iPhone app from the iTunes store.

And don’t forget! We still have a 25% Christmas discount on our Glubble Premium membership.

With a premium membership you can upload, store, and share unlimited high quality family photos using our unique Family Timeline service. You are going to need that once you start uploading those photos from your iPhone!

Use the following promotion code when you upgrade to premium :

6VP9L4

Login to your family page and then upgrade via your account settings or click here.

This offer will expire January 1st 2010.

On behalf of the Glubble team I  wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year. Happy shooting!

PS. Andoid phone users, our Andoid app will arrive shortly

The Glubble Family Timeline service

With a premium membership you can upload, store, and share unlimited high quality family photos using our unique Family Timeline service. Use the following promotion code when you upgrade to premium :

6VP9L4

Login to your family page and then upgrade via your account settings or click here.

This offer will expire January 1st 2010.

On behalf of the Glubble team I  wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

You can download the latest release here.
1. Real-time parental controls

Real-time permission requests for parents

Permission requests, adding web sites to your child’s collections, and allowing children to visit new websites are now handled in real-time. As soon as you approve a site or a collection, your child will be able to visit it.

2. Improved unblock and ask permission dialogue

The new block dialogue

Unfolding the immediate unlock feature

When a child tries to visit a web site that has not been approved by a parent, Glubble opens a dialogue that helps the child to ask permission to a parent to unlock the page. There are 2 options available (see images).

a. The child can press the Ask permission button. Glubble will immediately notify a parent of the request, and it can be handled directly if the parent is online.

b. If a parent is in the room with the child, the page can be unlocked immediately by entering the unlock password (see image)

3. Immediate access to the Kids browser

Upon installation of Glubble you can now directly access the Kids browser (by pressing the Kids browser icon in the Glubble toolbar). There is no need to create a kids profile first. We do that for you, and you can customize it later.

4. Kids search

We’ve decided to enable more kids search results by default. This allows a much improved search experience for kids, while keeping them safe at the same time. Kids still cannot access web sites you have not pre-approved, but at least it’s now possible to see what child-friendly search results are available. You can control this preference from the preferences dialogue accessible from your toolbar.

5. Introduction of OpenID for new users

New Glubble users can now register and log in using an existing account

Glubble now offers new users to register for Glubble with OpenID. No need to fill in a registration form, or remember a password. You can now use an existing Gmail, Yahoo!, Windows live or Wordpress account to get access to Glubble. We are very excited about this. With one click you can now join and login to Glubble. We are currently offering 4 types of accounts, but will add more services in the near future. Facebook and Twitter will be available within a few days.

Existing users will still have to log in using their current e-mail and family password credentials, but we will offer the ability to log in using OpenID to you shortly.

6. Interface improvements

We’ve tweaked our interfaces on many different places. The interface should now be more consistent and hopefully easier to use.

What’s up next

We are now working on an entire new Kids Browser! We want to make sure that kids love playing with Glubble and give them the feeling that Glubble provides them with a cooler and more fun Internet than their parents have. I am not going to disclose yet what the new browser will look like, but we will be looking for feedback from you later!

As always, we hope you and your family will enjoy this latest version of Glubble for Families!

Simplified Login

A new login screen

A big improvement for this release is a simplified login process. You can now login to the Family Page using your e-mail address and family password only. No need to enter a family-ID anymore.

If we can’t figure out what Family you are logging into (for example if you have more than one family page) we will still ask you to enter a family-ID, but in most cases you will no longer need that. This is the first step towards personalized logins and the possibility to login using existing credentials from services like Facebook, Twitter or Gmail (openID).

Clickable images on the Family Wall

Clickable Family wall messages to view your photos

If you now upload photos to your Family Timeline, then the Family wall message that notifies your family is clickable. If you click on a photo, it immediately opens  the right day on your Family Timeline, so that you can look at the new images, edit or share them, or start a slide show.

Account setting improvements

Overview

Account settings overview

When you click on my account settings from your Family Page you will see the overview page first. In this page you have quick access to adding family members, uploading photos to your Family Timeline, and the ability to start a new family page, next to the one you already have.

General settings

General settings

We’ve updated your account settings environment to match the new design style for Glubble. There is a new General settings tab that allows you to change general settings such as the Family name, the Family password, and the timezone you live in. It also contains the option to deactivate your account with Glubble.

Edit/Add Family members

We’ve simplified the Edit and add family member functionality. With a few clicks you can now invite new family members to your Family page and give children access to the fun and Safe Glubble Kids browser.

Your premium Membership

Glubble Premium Membership

Glubble offers premium membership which provides you unlimited uploading, storing, and sharing high quality photos with your family and friends. A great way to have your most important photos backed up safely on the web. Using the Family Timeline service you can build an online Family history and browse your photos on an interactive Timeline. Yo can share your most precious memories with your family. And share photos that you choose outside of your family. You remain in control of your privacy.

New personal sharing page

A personal photo sharing page

Your friends can see a slide show of your photos

Your Family timeline offers you the ability to share photos with people outside of your family using the share feature. Through a simple selection of photos and typing a personal message, your friends will receive an e-mail to a personalized website where they can see the latest photos, start a slide show or download a copy of the image.

Separate Kids account settings

We’ve separated the settings that relate to the kids browser from the family page settings so that you have a clear overview of the options for your child. In Glubbleworld you can activate and deactivate the Glubble website collections for your children. You can add new websites for your children in “Add website to your Kids Collection”. Kids Collection provides an overview of all sites you have added for your children to visit. And the Kids monitor provides you an overview of the sites your child has visited etc.

Improved overall stability and performance

We’ve done lots of smaller, under the hood, improvements to make the service faster and more reliable. We hope that you will find Glubble for Families v2.0.4.9 a big improvement!

Improved FAQ

We’ve updated our Frequently asked Questions list. If you have any questions, see if you can find the answers at www.glubble.com/faq, or join our forum here.

As always you can download the latest version here or here.

Here are the old and the new interface together:

The old Glubble Family Page design

The new Glubble Family Page Design

The new design is much simpler, contains less clutter, has the Family Timeline and Family Events integrated in a much nicer way. The top of the page now contains a (dark) bar where some main functionality will always be available. The latest photos uploaded to your Family Timeline are now presented in a slide show directly on your family page. We’ve increased the size of profile pictures, and organized them more efficiently on the page.

We also did part of the account settings section, but the remainder of that redesign will be taken care of in a release in 2 weeks from now.

There are numerous small improvements that make the service load faster and we hope that you will find the new design a big improvement. Be sure to upload a few family photos to see what that will do to your family page!

Let me know what you think of the redesign. As always we welcome your feedback.

There are many other things we will be releasing soon, but next up are a much improved account settings section, and we will work on personal logins (where every user has his own password), instead of the current practice of one password for the entire family.

Glubble v2 is now live for almost a year and most of our users have migrated to this new version. It has brought tons of improvements. The Kids browser is themable, we added social networking features so that children could chat with the entire (extended) family. We introduced family photos and events. We added lots of new content, including new green and environmental collections.

For parents and caretakers we brought more flexibility to broaden the Internet experience for each child. Personal collections, the ability to turn on collections of links per child, a much improved kids monitor.

Glubble launches the new Family Timeline service

We’ve also introduced the Family Timeline, a unique photo service that allows families to upload, store, view and share their most important family memories. It was featured in many different media during launch (see here and here for example), and has become an integral part of the family experience Glubble provides.

Furthermore, Glubble version 1 doesn’t work on the latest version of Firefox (3.5). We can’t support older versions of Firefox anymore, especially since Mozilla (the creator of Firefox) urges its users to upgrade to the latest version as it is a lot faster and more secure.

Because most of our users have migrated to the new Glubble for families we now feel it is time to close V1. It uses a very different (and incompatible) infrastructure. So if you are still using Glubble V1.x we urge you to upgrade immediately to the latest version of Glubble, V2.0.4.8. You can download the latest version here.

Glubble V1.x will no longer be available starting Wednesday September 10 16th 2009. We would like to thank all our users that enjoyed this version and helped us improve it over time. We hope to welcome the last users of V1.x  on our new Glubble for families service.

We have created new green collections of websites containing educational content, on-line interactive adventures, games, coloring books, exploration sites and much more. Children can now interactively learn more about our planet and its environment.

A selection of new green links in our Glubble collections

Would you like to learn more about global warming, your energy footprint, see how kids themselves are doing big things for the environment, or take a look at what’s in the ocean and our rain forests? Interested in exploring Yellowstone park, the Polar ice cap, Scholastic explorers, the National History Museum? It’s all there, and much, much more.

Through these new green collections teachers, parents and children have access to tons of educational material that can be used to make children aware of our environment.

We hope you will enjoy these new collections. You can now find and activate them for your children on the New Collections tab of your Family Page. Let’s make our planet a better place to live together!

Under the hood we made a lot of code changes to improve the overall speed of the site and the Family Timeline specifically.

New functionalities

New Family Timeline icon in the Glubble toolbar

1. The toolbar now has a new shortcut icon that takes you directly to your Family Timeline, the place where you can upload and share your family photos (see image above)


Family Timeline example



Premium users can now download high quality photos

2. The Family Timeline now provides premium users with the option to download images in their original (high quality). In order to access this option, visit your family Timeline, choose a photo by clicking on it, and then you will find the download option in the bottom right o the screen (see images above). Glubble feels it is important that you have easy access to the photos that you store online with us, and we will continue to add functionality to this. This new functionality allows family members to exchange high quality photos, but it will also allow premium users to share the original high quality image with friends (see below).


A Glubble personal sharing page where you share selected photos with friends



Friends can now see a slide show and download high quality photos

3. When you create personal sharing pages for your friends to share a few photos from your Family Timeline, they can now see a pretty slide show of the photos that you share with them, by clicking on them. Premium users can now let their friends download the original quality photo (see image above).

You can download the latest version right here.
We hope you will enjoy this new release. Next up is a redesign of the Family Page and account settings. we feel this can be simplified and improved. You will see noticeable differences in the coming weeks.

An important new functionality is that you can now share photos with anyone outside your family in a few easy steps.
No need to send large photo files to friends and family via e-mail. With the Family Timeline you can set up a personal share page that only people you want to share photos with can access. You remain in control of your privacy.

You can click on any image below to see a larger version.

Sharing your photos with friends is easy and fun!

Sharing photos using your Family Timeline can be done in 4 easy steps:

1. Locate the photos you want to share on your Family Timeline and press on the share button next to your photos

Locate the photos you want to share

2. Select the photos that you would like to share and add a personal message to them

Select the photos you want to share

Enter a personal message

3. Specify the e-mail addresses of friends that you would like to share your photos with

Enter the e-mail addresses to share with

4. Send out an e-mail invitation that allows your friends to see the photos

Your friends are invited to see your photos

Glubble takes care of the rest.  We automatically create a personal page for you and your friends to enjoy the photos you selected.  As you can see from the example at the top of this post, your personal message is placed right next to the photos.Your friends can now enjoy your photos, and they can download larger versions by clicking on the photos that they would like a copy of.

Sharing photos via your Family Timeline is convenient and fun, especially when you only want to share a selection of photos with your friends. No more full e-mail boxes. Try it yourself! It’s safe and fun to do!