SlideShowPro News

08.29.06  |  Where it all goes down

Curious to see where SlideShowPro is developed? Here’s my home office shot by a photographer friend for Matt Soorikian, the talented chap who designed, constructed and installed all the custom furniture. The panels underneath conceal my hard drives, cables, and power strips, and is an especially nice touch.

08.28.06  |  Filip Ziolkowski

Photographer Filip Ziolkowski is using SlideShowPro on his beautiful photolog site. Soft colors, nice typography, and a gallery full of great photos from around the world.

08.28.06  |  SlideShowPro 1.3.7 Released

Another little bug in 1.3.5 popped up, this time in regard to the Image Align parameter and Image Scaling (when set to “Downscale Only”). Images wouldn’t align correctly. This patch update fixes that. I also snuck in a new event which will come in handy for those who want to know the exact pixel dimensions of SlideShowPro — navHeight. The event broadcasts the pixel height of the navigation bar after it has drawn. Using this number, you can subtract it from the height of SSP to get the total available height so you know what size to make your (unscaled) images.

08.27.06  |  SlideShowPro 1.3.6 Released

A small bug with thumbnail navigation images that popped up in version 1.3.5 has been fixed in this patch release. The bug would occur whenever absolute thumbnail linkage was used on a per-image basis, and “tnPath” contained an undefined value. If you aren’t affected by any problems with 1.3.5, then you probably don’t need to update. But this fixes the issue for those who are.

08.25.06  |  SlideShowPro 1.3.5 Released

Notice anything different about the home page? That’s right, by very popular demand, thumbnail navigation! This version is mostly centered around the new thumbnail navigation type, but other updates included better image align, more accurate watermark align, a few bug fixes and optimizations, plus a big reorganization of the User Guide so new users have an easier time (hopefully) finding the information they’re looking for. For more information about this release, head on over to the version history in the forums. Otherwise, 1.3.5 is a free update for all registered users, so login to your profile to download.

08.20.06  |  Flickr support NOT ending!

Good news! I spoke with the developers of Flickr about their decision to delete their crossdomain file, and how it would adversely affect users of SlideShowPro, and they came up with a clever solution. Flickr has now moved all of their RSS feeds under the “api.flickr.com” domain, which has a crossdomain file that allows access from Flash apps. Old RSS feeds (that point to the top flickr.com domain) appear to be forwarding to their api.flickr.com feeds as well.

In essence, this means that Flickr/RSS parsing in SlideShowPro can continue. My thanks to the Flickr team for listening and coming up with such a clever solution.

08.17.06  |  Flickr support to end

Update: This post is no longer accurate, for the developers of Flickr changed their mind! Everything is fine.

I had a feeling a day like this would come, but it came much sooner than expected. Flickr is removing their crossdomain policy file in “the next couple of days” and will force all Flash applications to load data through their API at api.flickr.com.

What does all this mean? It means that without a crossdomain file hosted at Flickr.com, SlideShowPro will be unable to load RSS feeds. Which means, you guessed it, no photos from Flickr.

I wouldn’t make a big deal out of this if my application were a pet project, but we’re talking about lots and lots SWFs containing SlideShowPro all across the web right now that will soon be breaking. Poof! Oh, sorry, were you using that?

So like everything else in life, here’s the bad news and the good news.

The bad: SlideShowPro and all of its documentation (user guide, help documents) will have to be revised immediately to remove Flickr RSS support, and an updated version will be pushed out very soon to prevent new users from having problems. Old users, the ones with SWFs currently loading RSS feeds from Flickr, will need to use a third party script like FlickrSSP to now load content from Flickr.

I have researched the possibility of writing my own API parser in ActionScript to get around this, but the markup would be incredibly verbose, and would make the byte size of the component way larger than I’m comfortable with. (To prove my point, the open source Flickr API AS2 wrapper Flashr is nearly 300k of code).

Which leads me to the good news.

The good: By removing the Flickr RSS parsing from the component, every SWF published will be a little smaller, for a lot of unnecessary code can now be deleted.

Expect to see a new update pushed out sometime this weekend.

08.17.06  |  Flash Player 8 at 86%

Not SlideShowPro news per se, but important nonetheless. According to the latest Flash player penetration stats, Flash Player 8 is now installed in 86% of web browsers currently surfing the web. Flash Player 7, the minimum version of the player acceptable for SlideShowPro, is at 96%.

Is there any reason to publish SWFs containing SlideShowPro to Flash Player 8 as opposed to 7? Yes — text rendering. By default, Flash Player 8 uses an updated text rendering engine that vastly improves the legibility of text. By publishing your SlideShowPro SWFs as version 8 you can tap into this new engine, without having to change any settings, and your text fields — from captions to album titles, descriptions, etc. — will appear smoother and more legible.

Granted, there’s still a healthy number of people out there who don’t have 8 installed yet, so consider your audience (a stats package like Mint helps) before making any decisions.

08.16.06  |  Shutterhead

Photographer Jay Soto is using a very beautiful modification of SlideShowPro on his site Shutterhead Photography. Ultra large photos are displayed in SlideShowPro with all of its interface elements turned off, and in their place a custom vertical navigation and a beautiful image caption effect that appears on rollover (which is explained in this forum thread). Beautiful work all around.

08.09.06  |  Custom Navigation FLA updated

Per the request of many emails, I’ve updated the “Custom Navigation FLA” file that’s available for download from the SlideShowPro product page (in the member area). Lots of people have asked how to create a pair of previous/next buttons that don’t stop (in other words, loop continuously) so I modified the buttons to act that way. I also modified the Play/Pause button so that it changes visually when pressed (depending on what display mode the slide show is in). Dig in if interested.