A new SlideShowPro Flickr Group has been created and is open for all to be a part of. It’s a good place to post photos, discuss SSP, and share links. If you’re a Flickr user, jump in!
Developer Brad Daily has released SSPAdmin — a $5 PHP/MySQL software package built especially for SlideShowPro that handles all your album administration and XML creation. Check out the site for more details.
Great news for Flickr fans — the next update to SlideShowPro will load the full-size version of Flickr’s images instead of the medium sizes that are currently used. Permission was obtained directly from Flickr to modify their RSS feed (on the SSP side) to accommodate this popular-user request, and the difference is truly stunning.
A required change will be made to OPML documentation, and everyone currently loading Flickr content will need to update their file. I’ll have more details when 1.0.2 comes out (including details on what else has been added), but the change is pretty small. More soon. Nevermind – no modifications to existing OPML documents required.
A new Tutorials page has been added to the site to provide SSP users with a centralized index for all “how-to” walkthroughs and tutorials published on this site. And to kick it off, a new tutorial by guest author Massimo Fiorentino titled “PHP XML Generator for SlideShowPro” has been added. It’s an excellent beginners-guide for using PHP to automatically create XML data on-the-fly. Just instruct PHP where your images are, and update the directories with all the images you want without having to re-open your XML document. A very worthy read for those with PHP. Thanks Massimo!
In working on the next update to SSP, I’m weighing options on how to best implement edits to the static text fields. Swapping out the actual text isn’t that big a deal, but in areas where words are mixed with dynamic data it could be an issue.
The text fields I’m speaking of are “Previous Screen”, “Next Screen”, “Screen [n] of [n]” and “Image [n] of [n] from [album name]“. I could enable the alteration of every non-dynamic word in the aforementioned, but (when edited) would the sequence of items still work in non-English languages? Or would the order of static to dynamic items need to shift to be grammatically correct in a particular language? If anyone has a thought on this, please drop me an email.
Yep, you read that correctly. This technique is officially unsupported, meaning that the current build of SSP wasn’t necessarily built to incorporate this type of media, but because Flash treats video as an object like any other object, it’s not only possible, but pretty easy to set up. Check out this video demonstration featuring an FLV movie trailer and photos from the upcoming movie Sin City. If you are a registered user of SSP, you may login to your account and download the source files used to create this. My thanks go out to Flash developer Paddy Keane who came up with the very clever method to implement this. (And for the record, I have nothing to do with this movie. I just thought it would look better than some junky home movie).
What better way to spend a cold day than squashing bugs indoors? I’m pleased to report that SlideShowPro 1.0.1 has been released; containing a number of bug fixes, tweaks, and two feature request additions. To see what’s new in this release, see Version History. Also see the new “How to Update” document for instructions on how to install the new update and update your existing content.
This update also kicks off a new Users section of the site, which allows purchasers of SSP access to all component-related downloads. If you are a purchaser of SlideShowPro, check your inbox for an important email with instructions on how to sign-up and obtain access to the update. If you didn’t receive the email, or had issues with the sign-up process, let me know!
Note: all new purchasers of SlideShowPro on or after 2/19 automatically receive 1.0.1 when purchasing. No additional updaters are required.
If you’re a PHP, Perl, ASP or ColdFusion master, and would be interested in contributing source for other SlideShowPro users to download and use when creating their own galleries, drop me an email. You would receive full credit for your contribution, and it would be freely available to anyone to download and use. I’m especially interested in scripts that can automatically take a directory of images, parse out matching thumbnails at a smaller size, place them in the proper directories, and create an XML doc with all the necessary links. But anything that speeds workflow would be welcome. If interested, let me know!
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