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.
SlideShowPro for Lightroom and SlidePress updated for Director 1.5 support
To better support SlideShowPro Director 1.5′s new HTML5 mobile player for Apple iOS and Android devices, we’re updating today both SlideShowPro for Lightroom (1.9.8.5) and SlidePress (1.4.2). With these updates, slideshows created with either product (that load content from SlideShowPro Director) will publish embed code that is compatible with SlideShowPro Director’s mobile player. And by “compatible” we mean that if someone using a supported mobile device (without Flash) browses your site, and it contains a Flash slideshow published by either product, they will be able to access the mobile fallback player.
As part of these changes, if you currently load SlideShowPro Director in either product, you must first update your installation of SlideShowPro Director to 1.5. Reason being, we had to completely change how the Flash player is embedded in the export templates in order to support the mobile player, so updating to Director 1.5 first will avoid any potential problems.
More SlideShowPro for Lightroom updates
Along with the Director mobile player support in SlideShowPro for Lightroom, we’ve also updated some other things in the plugin, including…
1) New SWF architecture
SlideShowPro for Lightroom now exports a single SWF for your slideshows instead of two (bye bye “loader.swf”). This makes it easier to migrate exported content to a separate HTML document (not published by Lightroom).
2) Slideshow sizing
From now on, the slideshow width/height you assign is the actual size of your entire presentation. So if you include extra items outside the SlideShowPro Player (eg, the Header and Wet Floor effect) those items will be included in the overall height. Before, the assigned width/height was only used for the SlideShowPro Player, which caused headaches when people tried to embed the exported slideshow in separate HTML documents where a fixed SWF size was required.
3) Templates
SlideShowPro for Lightroom now contains the same player templates we created for SlideShowPro Director and SlidePress. This includes styles like “Ice”, “Techno”, “Glass”, “Salt” and others. This gives users some quick style options to choose from should they not feel like designing their own.
4) Version numbering
You may not have noticed, but the version number is 1.9.8.5, not 1.5 as published in our newsletter. Reason being, we’re making the version numbering of all SlideShowPro Player products (SlideShowPro for Flash, Lightroom, Standalone) so that it’s easier to document product updates.
Download / install
Owners of SlideShowPro for Lightroom can download this update through their Account Center profile page. SlidePress users can update their installations automatically by signing in to their WordPress installation.
As part of the SlideShowPro Standalone 1.9.8.5 update that came out today, our SlidePress plugin has also been updated to support 1.9.8.5′s new parameters, plus other enhancements / fixes. You should now see the available plugin update in your WordPress control panel.
SlideShowPro Standalone and SlidePress updated
Updates to both SlideShowPro Standalone and SlidePress (our WordPress plugin for Standalone) have been released today. This release brings the Standalone version of the SlideShowPro player up to 1.9.8.3, and incorporates all of the changes / fixes / additions to the core player. The SlidePress update includes updated gallery settings to support the new player options.
To download the SlideShowPro Standalone update, sign into the Account Center. To update SlidePress, sign-in to your WordPress installation and click the “Plugins” menu option. You’ll have the option to upgrade from there.
When updating SlidePress and previewing a slideshow, you will see a warning if your uploaded SWF is older than 1.9.8.3. To remedy, simply download the latest version of SlideShowPro Standalone from the Account Center and replace the SWF in your WordPress installation with the latest version. After that you should be all set.
For a list of what’s new in SlideShowPro, see the Flash component’s version history.
A small update to SlidePress has been released this morning. This release — version 1.3.4 — fixes a problem with xmlprc and a relative path embed problem in installations using clean URLs. Users of SlidePress can grab the latest update from within the WordPress control panel or download manually from the WordPress Plugins directory.
Now making its way up to the WordPress plugins directory is a 1.3.3 update for SlidePress. This is purely a bug-fix release that resolves a few issues that popped up in the past couple of weeks. You can read the list of updates here.
An update to SlidePress was posted this morning that addresses a handful of plugin bugs and feature updates. You should now be able to upgrade automatically within your WordPress installation, or download the update from the WordPress plugins directory.
The main new feature in this release is SWF uploading through the browser. This was formerly a manual process (only via FTP), and proved to be a bit cumbersome and error-prone for some new users. So we built in an uploader that creates the proper directories and moves the SWF to where it needs to go.
This release also updates the behavior of gallery style settings. Before, if galleries were created that borrowed the style settings of a saved gallery, and edits were made to the saved gallery settings thereafter, those changes would not update the “borrower” gallery. This update changes the behavior so that any galleries that use the settings of another gallery are “linked,” so to speak, so that changes to the original gallery settings are automatically migrated.
Also updated are usability improvements to the SlidePress button drop-down and the style settings drop-down. These now trigger a separate dialogue window to select galleries instead of displaying them inline. This should make selecting galleries in installations with many galleries much easier.
To read the full version history, click here.
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.
SlideShowPro Standalone now a separate product
As part of the SlidePress announcement made earlier, we have spun-off “SlideShowPro Standalone” into a separate product.
First, we should note a little history. SlideShowPro Standalone was initially offered as a free accessory to purchasers of SlideShowPro for Flash who wanted a way to embed and edit slideshows without the Flash authoring application (or Lightroom for that matter). We included it mainly as a courtesy, but over time interest in it from new customers grew — especially after the SlidePress plugin for WordPress was developed, for the plugin leveraged the Standalone version to publish slideshows.
As a result, we had a number of new customers asking if they could just purchase the Standalone version to use with SlidePress (or elsewhere) for they had no use for the Flash authoring components that were included with it.
With that, today we’re spinning off SlideShowPro Standalone as a separate, more affordable option for new customers. And as part of our acquisition of SlidePress, the two products will be marketed together as an integrated slideshow publishing option for WordPress users.
Now, if you’re an existing user, you’re probably wondering how this affects you. The good news is that all existing users of SlideShowPro for Flash will have their account center profiles updated with a free copy of SlideShowPro Standalone. So nothing is being taken away from you, and you’ll still be able to download updates to the standalone version going forward.
If you receive a “thank you for your purchase” email sometime today, SlideShowPro Standalone was added to your profile (for free).
If you have any questions concerning this change, please let us know.
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