The excellent work of Scott Shelton, developer of the popular Slide Press plugin for SlideShowPro, was featured today in two articles. The first as part of a Smashing Magazine feature, the other an interview at LostInTechnology. If you are both a WordPress and SlideShowPro user, but haven’t checked out Slide Press yet, check it out.
Every month loads of SlideShowPro users share their creations with us. From those submissions we pluck out the ten most creative, beautiful, and/or unique examples and include them in our monthly newsletter. Whichever site from those 10 stands out *just a little more* is crowned “Site of the Month”, which not only gives the site’s designer bragging rights, but also awards them with a free SlideShowPro t-shirt as our small way of saying ‘thank you’ for making us look so good.
SITE OF THE MONTH:
Number Eight Wired
http://www.numbereightwired.com/
Featuring the work of designer / coder / 3D artist George Coltart, Number Eight Wired is easily one of the most unique sites we’ve ever come across. From the stunning opening animation (which is actually a preloader — look closely) to the surreal 3D bouquet of animals and palm trees, Coltart’s talents are unmistakable. It comes as no surprise then to note that for the past couple of years he’s worked at the interactive agency Hi-ReS!, which has historically produced some of the most memorable, groundbreaking Flash sites on the web.
According to Coltart, who obviously has considerable ActionScript coding skills, he was “dreading” building the “Work” section of his site, for it would require dynamic updating, be navigable, etc. So to save time he used SlideShowPro for Flash and SlideShowPro Director, which “…stepped in and saved me countless hours.”
As for how he customized SlideShowPro, its navigation was removed in the “Work” section; leaving just the Content Area for his images. He then augmented the component with his own previous / next navigation links, and used SlideShowPro’s preloader events to render his own animation that slides across the top of the browser window (look up!). He also integrated his own tool tips and and other UI animations outside of the component that use a style identical to the ones inside SlideShowPro for visual unity all around.
SlideShowPro is also used in the “Reel” section to present a video of his work. Here he simply displays the media player interface on rollover, plus a Content Area tool tip / link to load a QuickTime version in a separate window.
Congratulations to George for a job well done!
THE REMAINING TOP 9 (ALL FANTASTIC – DIVE IN!):
http://www.industry11.com/portfolio
http://scherer-food-photography.com/
http://www.boyzandgirls.com/bluray.html
http://www.alonsocreative.com/work-photography-set-up-events.php
http://www.miszkinis.com
http://www.marcusroyhoffman.com
http://www.gerhardtrieb.at
http://www.alt-img.com
http://www.marciahamilton.com/
Note: To respect the privacy of our users, only those sites shared directly with us are considered and included. If you’d like us to consider your site for next month, please submit your site through the links below.
SlideShowPro for Lightroom 1.4.4 released
This point release brings the Lightroom version up to date with the latest build of the Flash component (1.9.4). New UI controls have been added for Audio Auto Start as well as Feedback Preloader Text Size. Registered users of SlideShowPro for Lightroom can download this update from the account center.
A new point update release for SlideShowPro for Flash is now available for download in the account center.
This release has its usual mix of tweaks and fixes, but also rolls in a couple of new parameters: Audio Auto Start and Feedback Preloader Text Size. The first allows audio that’s associated with an album to not auto-playback when the album loads, and instead lets the user initiate playback themselves (note that the textStrings property was updated as well to include messaging for the media player when Audio Auto Start is turned off). As for the latter, a Text Size parameter was added to control the point size of the text field inside the new “Beam” preloader. This should certainly come in handy for those using bitmap typefaces that require specific point sizes in order to work.
Check out the full version history notes here.
For those who are interested in integrating e-commerce functionality into their slideshows (to purchase prints, for example), there’s a new FoxyCart integration kit for SlideShowPro that links up your SlideShowPro for Flash slideshows with the popular e-commerce package FoxyCart. Check it out.
Director 1.3.3, DirectorPHP 1.1.3 released
We’ve just released minor updates to both SlideShowPro Director and the supporting DirectorPHP API class. For a full list of the changes, see the version history.
One notable fix is a resolution to a problem that has been around since the Director API was introduced. Previously, if an image had malformed metadata (in either the EXIF or IPTC tags), the API parser would break, causing any pages you had built with the API to die silently. The only solutions were to remove that image altogether or strip the image of its metadata, neither of which was ideal. With the introduction of Director 1.3.3 and DirectorPHP 1.1.3, we believe we have implemented an effective workaround that will prevent these images from being a problem.
Small maintenance update that improves component instantiation and garbage collection. This release is aimed towards those who tried to use more than one instance of the component in the same FLA. We only recommend those who had trouble doing the aforementioned updating to this version, for nothing else has changed.
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