SlideShowPro News

06.29.09  |  SlideShowPro Director 1.3.7, DirectorPHP 1.1.5 released

Hot off the press are two maintenance releases for SlideShowPro Director (1.3.7) and the DirectorPHP class (1.1.5).

Director 1.3.7 is mostly a bug-fix release, but does include a few additions. Most notably, we now include a “Download original image” link template and we’ve changed our uploader so that it recognizes IPTC keywords and automatically adds them as tags. For a list of all the changes in this releases, have a peek at the version history.

You can download the Director update by logging into your account center profile and the DirectorPHP update is available on the Director extras page.

If you are using the SlideShowPro Director hosting service at slideshowpro.com, your installs are already running 1.3.7, so enjoy!

06.20.09  |  Google now indexing external Flash content

Google has been indexing text found inside SWF files for a while now, but on Thursday they announced that they’ve added external content as part of their Flash indexing system. What exactly does that mean? It means that Google can now “see” the XML file that SlideShowPro loads and index any image links contained therein. When indexed, the images are associated with the SWF and HTML document embedding them so click-throughs would lead users to your slideshow.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that this is brand new, and we’ve yet to test their claim, but it’s an exciting development for anyone who would like their slideshow content to be discoverable by search engines. If you’d rather not let Google index your content, you can add a directive to your robots.txt file to block it.

06.17.09  |  Top 10 user examples for June 2009

Every day, users of our products share their creations with us. From those submissions we pick 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 winning user 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:

Cooperative Studios
http://www.cooperativestudios.com/

Cooperative Studios is a French multimedia company that specializes in providing surf and beach culture video content to news media and corporate clientele. Their web site, cooperativestudios.com, was developed by Will Hindson and uses SlideShowPro for Flash, SlideShowPro ThumbGrid, and SlideShowPro Director to present their portfolio of videos, plus photography. Interestingly, ThumbGrid (overlaid with a cool weathered frame) is used as an introductory navigational element in their “Footage” and “Portfolio” sections to dictate which video SlideShowPro for Flash should start with. Content captions are displayed outside of the component using ThumbGrid’s rollover events. After selection, ThumbGrid moves out of view, and SlideShowPro for Flash appears. The component is augmented with lateral navigation links, as well as a close button to move back. According to the developer, the protected area of their site (where clients download assets) also uses SlideShowPro Director to offer download links to the original, high-resolution video files. In summary, it’s a cool, creative, easily updatable web presence that is our pick for June “Site of the Month.”

THE REMAINING TOP 9 (ALL FANTASTIC – DIVE IN!):

http://www.mileskirk.com/
http://www.olgastefatou.com/
http://www.amyguip.com/
http://www.guyaslan.com/
http://www.danhigginsphotographer.com/
http://www.vincentmounier.com/
http://www.shreniksadalgi.com/
http://www.t-photographic.com/
http://maziarzpeople.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 by sending an email or posting to the Show & Tell Forum.

06.05.09  |  Say hello to Rob Henrichon

After corresponding with numerous people about our need for another support person, we’ve decided on Rob Henrichon — a longtime SlideShowPro for Flash and SlideShowPro Director user who has worked within the internet industry for a number of years; including a support role for a large email marketing company. Rob will be assisting us (and you) with support questions regarding SlideShowPro for Flash and SlideShowPro Director, so you can expect to see his name in both the forums as well as in support emails from us starting next Monday. Welcome aboard Rob!

06.02.09  |  SlideShowPro for Lightroom 1.4.6 released

The 1.4.6 version of SlideShowPro for Lightroom is now available for download in the account center. This release includes the new pan and zoom functionality we talked about last week.

Also updated is a small change to how the gallery title and description in the Header element is populated. The values are now read from the gallery element in images.xml instead of param.xml. This allows gallery titles and descriptions from SlideShowPro Director to appear as expected.