Just Leap In

Share links

the leapfrog — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:24:00 -0800

Hi folks—We’ve just released a fix for a bug recently affecting ‘share’ links and embedded spaces. Apologies to anyone whose embedded spaces were interrupted by the bug!

Live gatherings

the leapfrog — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:42:00 -0700

So we’ve been running these nice little live chats with community members and developers every Tuesday at 2pm Leap time (um, well, Pacific time). Basically we user-support-types and developer-types jump in and hang out in a recently updated space, leave some comments, and talk to you, if you’ll talk to us!

We like answering questions, naturally, and we REALLY love hearing your feedback, suggestions for new features, thoughts on virtual worlds… anything at all.

We’ve had a great time with this so far, so do drop by one of these Tuesdays. Or drop us a note if you want to get together and Tuesday doesn’t work for you.

Firefox 3.5 compatibility

the leapfrog — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:50:00 -0700

Updated 29 October 2009: Yeah, so we totally think we’ve fixed this now. :-) Let us know if you run into some more browser-related issues.

Updated 9 September 2009: Unfortunately afflicted by some new Firefox related issues, affecting identity choosing and upload. Working on it!

Updated 15 July 2009: And… fixed, as of earlier this week. Should all be happy in Firefox 3.5. Let us know if you see more cretinous issues.

Awesome to see Firefox 3.5 in the wild. Tragically we’re having some compatibility issues with space editing in JLI using 3.5—some editing features are working, others aren’t. We’re looking into it now; in the meanwhile, sorry to say you’ll have to stick with Firefox 3.0.x (link to download) for a little longer for JLI editing. Watch this space for updates, and thanks to several users for drawing the compatibility issue to our attention.

Tuesday shindigs

the leapfrog — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:36:00 -0700

Hola! We’ve had a great time at our last couple of live gatherings, and we’ve decided to start hosting a live get-together every Tuesday at 2pm PDT from now on, kicking off on

Tuesday June 30 at 2pm PDT (That’s 2pm on the West Coast, 5pm on the East Coast, 10pm in London …)

Drop in and join us @ justleapin.com next week! We’ll be in the top 3D space on the newsfeed. Admins will be online to answer questions and chat, and try some new stuff.

We’ve also put some fixes in place to facilitate real-time networking behind corporate or university firewalls, an often requested update—if you’re checking in from work or school and are free on Tuesday, come around and let us know if it works for you.

Hope to see you there!

Further to live gathering

the leapfrog — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:42:00 -0700

Thanks to all who came out over Saturday afternoon—it was very cool to meet you in (virtual) person. For any of you who couldn’t make it, or turned up lateish, do let us know what days and times would work better for you in future: there’s a thread over on the forum, or just drop us a line at betatest at justleapin dot com.

Happy leaping (outdoors or indoors).

First live gathering: Saturday May 30, 12pm Pacific

the leapfrog — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:26:00 -0700

Hiya folks,

Welcome to Spring!

For everyone interested in meeting your fellow beta testers, playing some games together, and brainstorming with us about how to take JLI to the next level, we’re planning to hold our first live online get-together on Saturday May 30th at 12:00 noon Pacific time (which is 3pm for those of you on the East coast, 8pm in London, wherever in the world you are…)

If you can get online and join us and other community members then, we’d love to meet you! Hopefully this will be the first of many events, with a forum to talk about JLI and other stuff, and try some new, shared activities.

Looking forward to seeing you online…

You may also have noticed some updates on JLI recently—notably a new Groups function, which lets you cluster favorites in one place, or make your spaces privately available to a select group of friends or colleagues. When we meet on Saturday, we’d like to invite your thoughts on what features should come next.

JLI updates

the leapfrog — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:53:00 -0700

Happy Friday, folks!—check out some updates gone live recently, including:

New spaces (including an underwater world and conferencing space)
Two new avatars
Autoplaying soundtracks (user-configurable via right-click or control-click)
Link any 3D object to launch a webpage
Increased duration limits for audio and video clips (5m each)
Experimental new prop: an expoding barrel. With physics. By popular request (!); You might have fun with this one. :-)
Stability updates for networking and some other functionality

More news coming soon…

PS – We’re seeing some issues with double-click (zoom) navigation in Mac clients in this release. We’re looking into it.

Updates

the leapfrog — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:33:00 -0800

Some general updates filtered through last week, our first all-round upgrade since Jan 1.

Mostly, this round contains lots of bugfixes for issues that you’ve kindly drawn to our attention in the last couple of weeks. Lots of stability and UI fixes are scattered throughout the release.

We’ve also been listening to your requests for new features.

As of last week, those who’ve been around for a while will notice the new list of online users, which you’ll find under Populated Spaces in the Home tab. Under Explore, you can now also sort by whether a space has any online users now.

More coming soon; Happy February!

TechCrunched!

the leapfrog — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:21:00 -0800

Thanks to Jason Kincaid over at TechCrunch for reviewing the JLI beta! That’s a nice thing to wake up to on a Monday morning.

Writes Jason: “Canadian-based Leap In Entertainment thinks it can do what Google couldn’t, and has just launched a brand new virtual world that might actually stand a chance.”

Go check out the review here.

Introducing Just Leap In

Michael — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:32:00 -0800

Today we’re opening up Just Leap In to a public beta group. After an engaging private beta, and thousands of stunning, media-rich 3D worlds on the web (thanks to an amazing beta group: You. Guys. Rock), we figure it’s time to kick the tires a little harder.

... and hey, to show the world how much liveliness there is in 2009’s Fellowship of Virtual Worlds. Our industry’s Boromir may have fallen, but even the smallest person, we hear, can change the course of the future.

Just Leap In?

Just Leap In (JLI for short) aims to broaden the appeal of web-based 3D for a mainstream audience, especially – early on – the kind of audience that uses a lot of social media tools: Facebook, Flickr, Friendfeed, YouTube, you name it.

Goals

We’re focused on delivering

• a simple, great experience of Web-based 3D media sharing
(photos, videos, music)
• useful social interactions (comments, chat, networking)
• ease-of-use (everything is drag-and-drop)
• a jaw-drapping 3D environment for web browsers on Mac & PC platforms.

We’re not (just) another virtual chatroom. Uniquely, we offer an RSSable newsfeed that syndicates 3D events ‘off-world’. While we’re delivering full game-state networking, we’re also after an asynchronous browsing experience, in order to make a 3D world function like a YouTube embed—or like any personal/corporate blog or webpage.

Mainly, though, we seek to ‘grow the pie’ for true 3D worlds on the Web, and appeal beyond an already-experienced 3D audience.

Mission

The first day I leap into 3D to find a friend or watch a film, and I forget it’s a “virtual world,” on that day the virtual worlds industry has grown up.

In that spirit, we’re aiming to make 3D part of the lifestream of the social web.

Who’s using this thing?

Most our private beta users are around the peak social media demographic (18-34), haven’t spent much time in a virtual world before, but are avid users of tools like Flickr and YouTube who are totally interested in swapping to a 3D environment. If you listen to those kinds of users, they want to do stuff like browse for friends and share photos and videos online. Other virtual worlds don’t actually make that stuff easy to do. So we’ve grown organically to make those key activities as simple as possible.

How do I get started?

It’s a free public beta—hop in over at JustLeapIn.com, create a 3D space, share it anywhere on the web, and let us know what you think.

Happy New Year to all!