Hello everyone! As many of you may know, tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day here in the US. It’s been a crazy few months here at SlideShowPro — some of the best we’ve had as a company — so we’ll be doing our share of giving thanks while spending some much needed downtime with family. As always, we’ll keep our ear to the ground for any emergency issues, but otherwise our support response will be slower than usual through the weekend. We’ll be back to full speed on Monday.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Director updated with important fix for SlideShowPro Mobile / iOS 4.2
We’ve just released a maintenance update for SlideShowPro Director, marked 1.5.2 (Build 5692). This update includes several small fixes (version history) and a very important update if you are taking advantage of SlideShowPro Mobile.
This past week, Apple released what is known as a GM (gold master) seed for iOS 4.2. This is typically the last developer seed for a new release, and it appears that iOS 4.2 will be released to all iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users on schedule sometime in November — possibly within the next week. Why is this important for SlideShowPro Director users? iOS 4.2 features a change that breaks video playback in SlideShowPro Mobile. We’ve resolved the issue with a fix in Director 1.5.2, and we encourage you to upgrade now so that your slideshows will be ready when iOS 4.2 drops.
1.5.2 is now available via the in-app updater or the account center if you prefer to update manually. If you are a hosting subscriber, we’ll be updating your install sometime over the weekend. Stay tuned to the SlideShowPro.com status blog for details.
I was the special guest on yesterday’s Big Web Show, a live internet talk show hosted by the esteemable Dan Benjamin and Jeffrey Zeldman. We talked about the roots of SlideShowPro, blogging (including why I stopped writing one), Flash, the iPad, interface design and other nerdy stuff. Check it out.
So you might be assuming (after a busy September) we’d coast through the rest of 2010 and take it easy for a while. Nothing could be further form the truth. We’ve been hard at work on some new product initiatives, all of which are centered around the same goal: providing SlideShowPro Director users with greater publishing and content management flexibility.
Director content architecture overhaul
Long ago when SlideShowPro Director was first conceived, it was built around the content hierarchy of the SlideShowPro Player. Meaning, all images had to be stored in albums. This system has served us and most users perfectly fine, but it’s not ideal, and actually prevents us (and you) from having the most complete publishing flexibility with your uploaded media.
We’re now working on a whole new content system that will allow images and videos to be fully independent of albums. Meaning, Director will have a single “library” that contains all your uploaded content. From there you’ll be able to collect content together in albums, then bundle albums together as galleries — just like you currently do. But the main difference is that you’ll have the freedom to use uploaded content in multiple albums without uploading duplicates or building an entirely new album just to change a few settings. This will make Director’s content system similar to what most people are accustomed to with desktop photo management products like Adobe Lightroom, web sites like Flickr, and others.
We believe this will make an enormous difference in how Director users manage content, and is an important step towards unlocking the full potential of our CMS.
SlidePress 2
SlidePress, our free plugin for publishing slideshows in WordPress, will soon be overhauled with a 2.0 update. The plugin will still publish slideshows of Director and non-Director content like it currently does, but 2.0 will add the ability to publish individual photos and videos from SlideShowPro Director.
With SlidePress 2, you’ll be able to edit a blog post, browse through your SlideShowPro Director content library, then insert asset(s) at whatever size you need. Director will handle everything else for you. This will give WordPress users the ability to use Director to easily publish photos, videos, and/or slideshows of their media without leaving WordPress.
SlideShowPro Director ActionScript 3 API
SlideShowPro Director has long offered a public API, but there hasn’t been a way for Flash developers to easily access it (outside of the SlideShowPro for Flash/ThumbGrid components). So in the coming weeks we’re going to offer a free, fully documented, ActionScript 3 API library to give ActionScript developers the means to create whatever they like using SlideShowPro Director as their content publishing backend. The library will include both raw ActionScript library code, plus a compiled SWC for convenience. We believe this will give hardcore Flash users the power to build all kinds of things that supersede the functionality of the SlideShowPro Player, and opens the system up for third party developers to get more involved with the SlideShowPro Director platform.
Summary
All together, our aim these next few months is to not only give current SlideShowPro Director users more ways to access, manage, and publish their content, but to also build a stronger, more flexible media publishing platform that will pave the way for even greater things to come. We appreciate our community’s investment in SlideShowPro Director, and intend to make it an even more valuable and useful product. Expect to see additional updates concerning all the above in the weeks / months ahead.
September was an amazing, busy month for SlideShowPro.
Following weeks of extensive beta testing by many of you, we kicked September off with the public release of SlideShowPro Director 1.5. For the rest of the month we were inundated with a constant stream of positive (and constructive) feedback as long-time Director users and their web site visitors were able to browse Director slideshow content for the first time using their iPhones, iPads and Android devices. We also attracted — thanks to awesome word-of-mouth from many of you — a number of new SlideShowPro community members experiencing our products for the first time.
Also in September we revamped our support wiki, redesigned much of our product site, released updates for SlideShowPro for Lightroom and SlidePress to support SlideShowPro Director 1.5′s mobile player, and somehow found the time to release SlideShowPro Director 1.5.1, which included new mobile poster designs, a revamped slideshow publishing window, mobile player optimizations, and more.
At its close, September also turned out to be one of our most active sales months, with one day in particular processing more orders in 24 hours than any day in all the years SlideShowPro has been in business. We simply couldn’t have done it without our community’s support, and for that we thank you.
Today is actually the final day you can pickup the self-install version of SlideShowPro Director for $39. At midnight tonight, ET, it will change to $59. So if you’ve been putting off purchasing Director, or you will have an eventual need for it with future client projects, now’s the time!
By the way, next week we’re going to kick-off October by providing you with a roadmap of what we’ll be working on for the rest of 2010. We have some exciting stuff to tease, so stay tuned!
Every day, people from around the world submit web sites to us that use our products, and from those submissions we hand pick the ten most interesting, beautiful, and/or creative works and feature them here as our “Sites of the Month”. As a way of saying ‘thank you’ for making us look so good, each honoree is entitled to a free SlideShowPro t-shirt. If that’s you, contact us to request one.
SITES OF THE MONTH: AUGUST 2010
Stanley ChangSlideShowPro Player, ThumbGrid, Director
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Adam LernerSlideShowPro Player
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Fredrik ÖdmanSlideShowPro Director API, Custom Flash
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Mike Hill DesignSlideShowPro Player, ThumbGrid, Director
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Erik ZapponSlideShowPro Director API, Custom Flash
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Julien AguetSlideShowPro Player
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Richard BernardinSlideShowPro Player, Director, ThumbGrid
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Erika AshauerSlidePress, SlideShowPro Standalone
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Demond MeekSlideShowPro Player, ThumbGrid, Director
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Wanamaker PhotographySSlidePress, SlideShowPro Standalone
SHARE YOUR OWN EXAMPLE
Build something of your own with our products recently? Share it with us! Your submission will be considered for next month’s roundup.
SlideShowPro 1.5 beta updated, nearing stable release
We’ve packaged up another update to the SlideShowPro Director 1.5 beta, labeled Build 5452. This update fixes a handful of bugs and also includes some refinements to how content is published using Director. See a full list of changes in the beta forum.
With this release, Director 1.5 is feature complete and hopefully bug-free. Barring any show-stoppers in this last beta phase, we expect to release 1.5 as stable to self-hosted customers in the next few weeks and hosting subscribers soon after that. So if you are a beta tester, please update to the latest build (via the in-app updater or the account center) and let us know if you find any issues. Thanks!
Love Director and SlideShowPro Mobile? We need testimonials!
If you’re currently beta testing SlideShowPro Mobile and Director 1.5 and have integrated Director’s new publishing into your site, we’d love to hear from you! For marketing and promotional purposes (both us and you), we’re looking for testimonials we can publish. We’ll of course reciprocate the favor by linking back to your site, so you’ll receive some great return traffic.
Want to submit a testimonial? Here’s how:
1) Send an email to: support AT slideshowpro.net
2) Write about how you’ve used Director and the mobile player, plus a URL to your site.
3) Include your first and last name (or business name) for attribution.
4) Attach a medium-sized photo of yourself (around 250px will be fine).
We’ll pick testimonials from the results and publish them here on the site when Director 1.5 goes live. We appreciate the feedback!
Director 1.5 beta updated, SlideShowPro Mobile now supports Android
The beta train for SlideShowPro Director 1.5 keeps rolling along. This new build (Build 5394) contains several fixes but most notably is the first beta to include support for Android phones (Android OS 2.0+ required).
One of the more difficult aspects of developing for Android is fragmentation. Unlike iOS, which is used only on Apple devices, Android is used on multiple devices and is often modified to some extent by the manufacturer or the carrier (or both). Because of that, we could really use your help in testing our mobile player if you are running an Android phone (OS 2.0+). You can either try the beta on your own install, or just load up our mobile demo directly. We’d appreciate any and all feedback, and be sure to include what device/OS version you are using. Thanks!
Please note that this is still beta software and should not be used on production websites. We cannot guarantee if it will work or when bugs will be fixed.
New beta of SlideShowPro Director 1.5 / SlideShowPro Mobile available
Over the last week, we’ve had more than 100 early adopters kicking the tires on the SlideShowPro Director 1.5 beta (which also includes SlideShowPro Mobile). Thanks to their testing and feedback, we’ve been able to resolve several issues with the release of the second beta for 1.5, Build 5354. The new beta is available via the in-app upgrade process or the account center.
For more info on the beta, check out the dedicated wiki section for 1.5. We greatly value your feedback, so be sure to drop us a note in the beta form if you encounter any issues or just have a suggestion. Again, thanks for testing!
Please note that this is still beta software and should not be used on production websites. We cannot guarantee if it will work or when bugs will be fixed.
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