SlideShowPro News

10.30.07  |  iPhoto 7 compatible plugin now available

As promised, the free SlideShowPro Export for iPhoto plugin has been updated to work with iPhoto ’08 (aka iPhoto 7, and part of the new iLife ’08 suite of apps). Visit the extras section to download (you must be logged in to your account, and will be notified accordingly if need be).

Because of all the changes Apple made to iPhoto, it was impossible to continue offering a single plugin for all versions of iPhoto. With that, there are now two versions available: 1.0.4, which is the same plugin as before, and 1.0.5, which only works with iPhoto ’08.

The 1.0.5 version is pretty much exactly the same as 1.0.4, but with one notable difference. By popular demand, we’ve added a little more control over how image caption fields are populated. In previous versions, the caption field for every image in an album automatically filled with the filename and modification date of the image. This was fine for most, but it was a pain for those who wanted to manually enter their own. So in 1.0.5, the caption fields are empty by default, and if you want to auto-fill them there’s a button to click that’ll do it for you. It also includes a “Clear” button to get rid of them all, in case you change your mind.

At any rate, apologies for the long delay, but numerous factors preventing it from happening as quickly as we’d like. The good news is that it’s finished, and now available for all SlideShowPro users.

10.29.07  |  Oliver Peoples / Gramercy Park Hotel

A double shot of SlideShowPro examples sent in by their creator, Michael Davis. The first is Oliver Peoples, an eyewear company. SlideShowPro is being used on their home page to present an interesting mix of black and white photographs grouped together in pairs and sequenced to tell a mysterious story. The second is the famous (or is it infamous?) Gramercy Park Hotel, which is well known in design circles for its unorthodox, ground breaking interior design and art direction. SlideShowPro is used on multiple pages, with a nice serif typeface used for its numerical navigation, and a “floating” look that removes the component’s outer border and sets the navigation background to the same color as the page for a look that’s clean and stylish.

10.26.07  |  Director and Leopard

We’re just as excited as anyone about receiving our copies of Leopard, Apple’s latest iteration of Mac OS X. However, there does seem to be a glitch in Leopard with regard to uploading content into Director. We haven’t seen this firsthand, but several users who’ve already received their copies of Leopard have wrote in to report the issue.

So, if it is absolutely necessary that you be able to upload to a Director installation from your Mac, you might want to hold off on upgrading to Leopard until we can isolate and fix the issue. We’ll be grabbing our copies of Leopard later on today, and getting Director into line will be a top priority. More to come…

Update (10/27/2007): We’ve since confirmed this problem ourselves, and learned that the issue is with the Flash Player in Leopard (10.5), and affects any web site out there (of which there are plenty) using Flash as an upload gateway. Adobe is apparently aware of the issue and working on an update.

10.25.07  |  Pogo Pictures

Pogo Pictures, who are literally a few miles from SlideShowPro HQ in Atlanta, are using SlideShowPro…well…everywhere on their web site. It displays photos on their home page, videos on the “Directors” pages (with an external thumbnail loader), recent images on the News page, and background images (with an external navigation overlay) in their Space and Locations sections. Each instance is managed and updated by the Pogo staff using SlideShowPro Director on the back-end.

A great example of the flexibility SlideShowPro and Director offer by tapping into nearly every facet of what’s possible with both applications.

10.24.07  |  Coming soon: SlideShowPro for Adobe Lightroom

A frequent request from many, I’m pleased to announce that in the coming weeks we’ll be offering a plugin for Adobe Lightroom, the Windows / OS X photo management and editing software developed for professional photographers.

The SlideShowPro plugin fits right into Lightroom’s “Web module” workspace, which is where you can export/upload HTML/Flash photo galleries using your Lightroom content. You simply decide what size you want your slideshow to be, how you want it to be styled, and Lightroom publishes all the XML data, HTML, and imagery for you. It all works beautifully, and will (hopefully) be of interest to new customers (especially those without Flash or web development experience) as well as existing users of the Flash component.

With that, there will be two versions of the plugin — a “complete” version that ships with everything a new customer (without Flash or SlideShowPro) needs, and an “incomplete” version designed for existing users of SlideShowPro. For the “incomplete” version, you simply publish a SWF containing the component and add it to the SlideShowPro for Lightroom’s plugin folder. Your “incomplete” version will then be “complete,” and ready to go.

Both versions will be purchasable, with “incomplete” obviously costing less than “complete,” but we haven’t figured out exact pricing yet. Expect more information on that, including screenshots, in the near future!

10.23.07  |  New demo posted: SlideShowPro with Lightbox2

A few people in the forums asked recently how to use SlideShowPro with the Lightbox2 javascript library so that slideshow content can be clicked and opened inside Lightbox. So I sat down and knocked out a demo that shows how to setup your HTML file so that data can be passed from SlideShowPro to JavaScript to popup Lightbox. You can use this to pop open the same image loaded in SlideShowPro, or a completely different image. You can also assign a different image caption for use in Lightbox.

Here’s a preview. To download the source files, visit the SlideShowPro download page in the Account Center (requires login).

10.20.07  |  Matt Marcinkowski Photography

The portfolio for Matt Marcinkowski Photography is using SlideShowPro and SlideShowPro Director to present his collection of original work. Featuring one of the more interesting customizations of SlideShowPro I’ve seen, the component is scaled wide, and all slideshow content is aligned Center Right (through Content Align). The gallery, play/pause, and full screen buttons were removed (through Navigation Buttons Appearance) to leave nothing but thumbnails and navigation link icons. The background of all component elements were made transparent, and the designer positioned graphical shapes underneath (like the ovals underneath the navigation icons and the horizontal gradient behind the slideshow imagery) for extra style. Finally, an external navigation was added for selecting albums from outside the embedded gallery interface.

In all, a creative and engaging implementation that shows how far you can get by customizing SlideShowPro’s parameters.

10.18.07  |  Director 1.1.4 now available

Well, the factory is running at full tilt lately and another bug-fix release for Director just rolled off the line. The main issue resolved in this release was a problem with how portrait images were being scaled down and optimized for your slideshows. This bug also manifested itself by not honoring the focal point setting for the affected images. Both issues are now resolved, as well as a few others. For full details, check the version history.

10.18.07  |  SlideShowPro 1.6.3 Released

A little pesky display issue with the media player popped up after 1.6.2 went out the door yesterday, so I quickly patched the problem and pushed out a new release. If you’re not using video, or if you are (but always include the media player interface), there’s no real need to update. But if you’re using 1.6.2, and are hiding the media player when using video, it’s recommended.

10.17.07  |  SlideShowPro 1.6.2 Released

A few more glitchy things popped up from version 1.6.0, so version 1.6.2 of the component is now available for download. To read what’s changed / fixed in this release, check out the version history.