SlideShowPro News

01.30.08  |  Announcing the Director API

Update (2/10): The Director API is now in public alpha.

While the introduction of the on-demand image publishing system in Director 1.1 made it much easier for you to publish slideshows using SlideShowPro, it did limit your ability to use Director’s imagery and data outside of SlideShowPro. Because of the complicated way in which the URLs were published for the on-demand system, it was virtually impossible to get your optimized images for use in other areas of your website. To bridge that gap, Director 1.2 will feature a simple API that allows you to access your galleries, albums and images via PHP or any other web programming language. We’ll begin beta testing Director 1.2 in the coming weeks, watch this space for an announcement.

To show you just a glimpse of the possibilities, I’ve created a simple Lightbox2 example using the API. It makes a direct request to our slideshowpro.net Director install for the “Open Road” album. In the process of making the request, we tell Director we want two different versions of the images for the Lightbox display. Just like with SlideShowPro, we can request them at a certain width and height, cropped to fit or proportionally scaled and at whatever quality and sharpening settings we desire. The Director API puts the full power of the on-demand image publishing system at your fingertips.

Of course, this will also be available for the Director hosting service at slideshowpro.com. The API for both versions of Director will be released in public beta form in the coming weeks. If you are well-versed in PHP, have a Director install (whether on your own server or the hosting service) and would be interested in a private beta for the API, shoot me an email (brad[at]slideshowpro.net) and you can get started even sooner!

01.28.08  |  SlideShowPro for Flash 1.7.0b3 available

The beta train for SlideShowPro for Flash 1.7 keeps chugging along with a third release that’s now available for download. This releases fixes a couple of bugs from the second beta, and provides further refinements / optimizations to other new features. There is one new thing however, and that’s a circular control “knob” inside the progress bar of the media player to control scrubbing. You could scrub before by clicking and dragging the end of the progress bar, but this release makes the region a bit more obvious. The color of the element can be independently controlled.

If interested, here’s the 1.7.0b3 version history.

Thanks again to everyone who’s tested 1.7 and provided feedback thus far.

01.23.08  |  Director 1.1.9

If you have upgraded to 1.1.8 and are suddenly having issues with thumbnails not showing up, Director 1.1.9 is your ticket back to stability. Turns out some of the new ImageMagick parameters we are utilizing were only introduced in ImageMagick 6, so if your install was using an older version of ImageMagick the image processing was failing.

That’s the only change, so if 1.1.8 is working as expected you can sit tight.

01.22.08  |  Director 1.1.8 released

Primarily a bug-fix release, Director 1.1.8 is now available for download. Along with the minor bug fixes, it includes two changes that are worth noting here.

First, as more and more of you have taken advantage of using ImageMagick for image processing, we’ve noticed that most hosts use the 16-bit, default version of ImageMagick. While 16-bit image processing is useful for editing imagery, it really has no use when displaying optimized images on the web. Director 1.1.8 now automatically uses 8-bit processing for its on-demand image publishing, which in many cases will drastically reduce the file size of the optimized imagery. As always, your originally uploaded imagery remains untouched, only the optimized copies Director creates are affected.

Lastly, when the beta for SlideShowPro 1.7 was released, the new “vidpreview” parameter was not supported in Director. We’ve added that functionality in Director 1.1.8, so if you are testing out the new SlideShowPro beta your existing video previews will now also be published as the larger video preview.

For the rest of the changes, check out the Director version history.

01.21.08  |  SlideShowPro for Flash 1.7.0b2 available

The second public beta of SlideShowPro for Flash 1.7 is now available for download. This release mostly refines/fixes a few things from beta 1, with the notable exception of a couple of new additions. First, a video play button now appears in the center of a video’s preview graphic (if one is assigned), and as you might expect, it plays the associated video when clicked. It also appears at the end of a video if Display Mode is set to “Manual” (so that it can be restarted).

Secondly, the “Director Image Format” option from beta 1 has changed names to “Content Format” because that same functionality now applies to Media RSS feeds that contain a selection of imagery to choose from. In other words, if a feed contains large, high-resolution imagery and “Content Format” is set to “Full Screen,” SlideShowPro for Flash will load the largest possible version that’ll fit a user’s monitor resolution. If “Normal” (the default), SlideShowPro for Flash will load the largest possible version that’ll fit the SWF size in HTML.

To read more about this release, see the beta 2 version notes. And as usual, feedback is encouraged.

01.20.08  |  Jason Miles Kirk

Photographer Jason Miles Kirk has a clever implementation of SlideShowPro for Flash on his portfolio site. Instead of using the gallery as a collection of albums (with each album containing multiple images), Jason built his gallery so that each “album” is actually only a single image, and then used a thumbnail of that image as the album preview. The result? A grid of images that all appear to be part of the same collection. Jason then took things a step further by turning off SlideShowPro for Flash’s embedded navigation (set “Navigation Appearance” to “Hidden”), and added left/right arrow buttons outside of the component that load the next album in sequence when clicked. Last but certainly not least, he uses the onImageRoll() / onImageData() events to display his own external caption that layers over slideshow content when engaged with the mouse. Nice work Jason!

01.16.08  |  SlideShowPro for Flash 1.7.0 public beta available

Interested in checking out the next ‘major’ update to SlideShowPro for Flash? A public beta for SlideShowPro for Flash 1.7.0 is now available for download in the Account Center. What’s new, you ask? Well, a lot of stuff, most of which was implemented based on recent (and some old) feedback. Here we go:

• Volume control in the media player (for both audio/video)
• Navigation can now be positioned on top
• Media player can now be positioned on top
• Auto-start option for videos (toggle off/on). When off, you can assign a preview graphic.
• “Director Image Format” option to control which ‘view’ it should format imagery for (normal or full screen)
• New album preview style: “Banner Top”.
• New “Crop to Fit All” option to fill the whole component area (instead of content area)
• Preloader and timer can now be aligned to any of the 8 clockwise points.
• Preloader and timer can now be positioned inside the content area or inside content (latter looks best with ‘floating’ style imagery)
• Two new preloader styles — “Spinner” and “Pie Spinner”
• Media RSS support
• Multiple XML files from different sources can be combined/loaded as one gallery using OPML
• Completely revised caching system for better bandwidth consumption
• Padding controls for captions, albums and the gallery

There are a few other tweaky things here and there, but those are the highlights. To read the complete version history, click here.

This beta is available for any current SlideShowPro for Flash user, and can be downloaded from the SlideShowPro for Flash download page in the Account Center. We recommend that only current users with experience using the product download and test this release, and ask that all feedback be directed to the dedicated 1.7.0 beta forum. The beta extension can be safely installed/removed from Flash without affecting your current (stable) build of SSP.

Finally, if you do download, please be sure to read the read-me that comes inside. It contains additional notes concerning the update.

01.11.08  |  SlideShowPro for Lightroom 1.0.6 released, trial available

A little bit of debug code accidentally went out the door with the 1.0.5 update a couple of days ago (doh!), so we’re pushing out a quick update (1.0.6) that resolves that single issue. We’re also now offering a free, downloadable trial of SlideShowPro for Lightroom 1.0.6, which you can download from here. The demo is fully functional, with the exception of demo text that overlays the slideshow. So if you’ve been interested in checking it out, but haven’t purchased, now’s your chance to kick the tires.

01.09.08  |  SlideShowPro for Lightroom 1.0.5 Released

A quick patch to fix a full screen related issue inadvertently introduced in yesterday’s 1.0.4 release. SlideShowPro for Lightroom users may visit the product download page to obtain this update.

01.08.08  |  SlideShowPro for Lightroom 1.0.4 Released

A new update to SlideShowPro for Lightroom is now available for download. This update patches (crossing fingers!) a rather nasty CPU usage problem that reared its ugly head only in Windows XP and only with some hardware configurations. It took a little longer than expected to track down a piece of hardware that could replicate the problem (an old Dell Inspiron did the trick), but we were able to track down the cause.

This update also tweaks a few other things, including a background drawing problem (where a dark gray background would be visible for a split second), adjustments to min/max values for some parameters, an XML encoding change, and an adjustment to the default width/height of SlideShowPro for Lightroom (as well as the published image size) so that out-of-the-box 4:3 landscape imagery are flush and completely fill the content area.

This update is free for all SlideShowPro for Lightroom users, and can be downloaded from SlideShowPro for Lightroom product page.