We’re pleased to announce that the latest version of Prism is now available to preview.

Mobile Interface Enhancements

The main feature in this release is the Prism Mobile Interface. This makes your Prism-based catalogue into a mobile “web app”, optimised for viewing on all modern smart phones (iPhone, Android and others). We’re really pleased with the way this has turned out and think it will be a valuable feature for an increasingly mobile user base.

The mobile interface enables an adaptive design that triggers when a small-screen device accesses the page and reformats the page to be more mobile friendly. This feature also includes a huge number of improvements to speeding up access over slower mobile networks using browser-side caching.

Enhancements include:

• Enhanced theme display on mobile devices
• Background loading of search results for speedier paging and fewer requests
• Browser-side caching of search results for faster repeat viewing
• Swipe gestures can be used to page searches results on touch-enabled devices
• Home screen icon for iOS

More about these enhancements was covered in the recent mobile interface webinar.

The mobile interface itself requires a modification to the tenancy configuration and we recommend you test this on your sandbox tenancy before going live. If you raise a service request we will add the configuration as soon as possible and let you know when it’s available.

Some features use interface fragments that were previously hidden (the default application title is Talis Prism for example) and you may wish to add these requests to the same service request.

Improvements to CSS for Themes

In addition to the mobile work the release also includes a vast array of performance optimisations for themes by updating the CSS:

• All CSS merged into one file for faster delivery
• Better caching of CSS
• New features for targeting older Internet Explorer browsers
• Improved Print stylesheets
• Additional CSS hooks on the advanced search page  for easier styling

Along with details about how to customise the mobile theme, we’ll include details about these improvements in an upcoming blog post and revised version of the Design Guidelines.

Because there are so many changes behind the scenes we strongly recommend that everyone checks the preview of their catalogue carefully to make sure themes display as expected. We’ll leave this version on preview for two weeks to ensure there’s time to catch any oddities.

Support for Additional LDS Authentication Methods

This release also includes additional features allowing for future development of expanded authentication methods.

Tiny Images on account pages

Our new jacket enrichments allows much more flexibility in terms of image sizes available. We’ve turned on the additional tiny image size in places  where it is more appropriate than the default small image.

Previewing this new version in your catalogue

As usual, this version of Prism can be accessed by including /demo/ before the tenancy part of your url, so for example http://prism.talis.com/demo/southwark for Southwark’s catalogue. If you are testing the mobile interface we will add that to your sandbox tenancy first and will contact you when it is enabled with further details.