We’re joining our fellow Americans in the great, gluttonous tradition known as Thanksgiving today. That means we are enduring family get togethers in the name of copious amounts of turkey, dressing and other fixings. If you are also celebrating today, we wish you and your family a Happy Thanksgiving.
We’ll be keeping an eye on things in case of emergencies, but will be mostly offline through the weekend. Happy Thanksgiving and we’ll see you Monday.
Director 1.4.1 released, features watermarking
We’re happy to announce SlideShowPro Director 1.4.1 is now available for download. Director 1.4.1 includes new support for built-in watermarking, allowing you to upload an image (transparent PNGs work best) to use as a watermark, then Director composites that image on your original content when it creates the optimized copy for your slideshows. You can define as many different watermarks as you like, and change what watermark is applied on a per-album basis. You can also control the positioning of the watermark and its opacity when composited with the image.
Director 1.4.1 also includes several bugfixes and four new bundled translations (German, Russian, Italian and French). For a full list of the changes, see the Director Version History page on the wiki.
If you are running Director 1.4.0, then you can upgrade using the in-app upgrade process. If you are running an older version, Director 1.4.1 is available in the account center.
If you use the Director hosting service, we’ll be deploying 1.4.1 to your account at the beginning of next week, once we know that all the bugs are worked out. Stay tuned to the Status Blog for more info.
SlideShowPro for Flash 1.9.8.1 released
A small maintenance release to SlideShowPro for Flash has been released that fixes a couple of edge-case video issues. See the version history for details.
Today we’re pleased to announce that Christopher Reding — a name some of you may recognize from the support forums — is now assisting us (in a more official capacity) with product support and development. Christopher has considerable experience using both SlideShowPro for Flash and SlideShowPro Director, so expect to see more of him in the forums and in email support correspondence from us. Welcome Christopher!
A couple of little issues in SlidePress 1.3 were discovered over the weekend, so today we’re releasing 1.3.1. Expect to see a plugin update notification in WordPress within the hour.
Our WordPress plugin SlidePress has been updated to version 1.3 and is now available in the WordPress plugin directory for updating.
This version is notable for it includes a number of usability enhancements, bug fixes, and a host of underlying code improvements. Notable additions and changes include:
* Six new default themes to choose from when publishing a gallery.
* Complete redesign / reorganization of gallery settings interface (see below).
* Support for h.264 videos uploaded to the WordPress Media Library.
* WordPress page publishing from the SlidePress post button.
With this release we strived to not only fix problems that popped up after our previous release, but also improve the basic usability of the plugin. Of note is the “Style Settings” area, which before was one (very) long, noisy list of checkboxes, inputs and colored boxes. For 1.3 we’ve re-organized all the settings into containers which may be toggled open/closed for editing. In addition, settings now disable (and hide) if they aren’t applicable due to the value of a “parent” setting. For example, you now only see the pan & zoom customization settings if “Use Pan and Zoom” is enabled. This cuts down on the amount of visual inputs, and also avoids any potential confusion when editing.
Click here for the full version history. To upgrade, see the updating instructions in the wiki. Using SlideShowPro Standalone 1.9.8 is recommended with this release, so you should also update your SWF as well. Download the latest version of SlideShowPro Standalone from the account center.
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:
Gabriel Jeffrey
http://gabrieljeffrey.com/
The online photography portfolio of Gabriel Jeffrey is an exercise in both simplicity and visual impact. The site uses SlideShowPro Director (for content management and publishing) and SlideShowPro for Flash, which has nearly every inline interface item turned off. The component is scaled to the dimensions of the SWF — allowing photos to be displayed full-frame in the browser window at any screen resolution. The site contains a simple navigation positioned at the top left, plus large forward / backward graphics layered on top of the component for lateral browsing through an album. Last but certainly not least, there’s also a collection of beautifully-shot videos in the “Moving Images” section that uses SlideShowPro’s media player interface.
THE REMAINING TOP 9 (ALL FANTASTIC – DIVE IN!):
http://www.imagebychristos.com/
http://vixpetportraits.com/
http://www.studio-ca.se/
http://dirkrauscher.de/
http://www.reneadler.com/
http://www.tedmorrison.com/ (Director API)
http://www.indyrain.com/
http://www.sambroadbent.co.uk/
http://www.accesi.lv
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.
A maintenance update to SlideShowPro ThumbGrid has been released. This version, 1.3.4, improves thumbnail image alpha tweening so that semi-opaque values for Active / Inactive / Rollover behave more consistently when animating. This update can be downloaded from the account center.
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