We’ve updated our examples page with ten new examples from the SlideShowPro community: Eric Ogden, Ricky Restiano, Johann Ployer, David Goldman, Gary Gunderson, Ardent Story, Lee Carter, Sara Appelgren, Fizheye Creative Inc, and Sophie Qureshi. If you’d like to submit your work for consideration next month, submit your example here.
New in Director 1.5.3: Universal video embedding
With the addition of universal slideshow publishing and embedding in Director 1.5, we made it easier than ever to embed your slideshows for both desktop and mobile playback. Today we are extending that even further with the addition of universal video embedding in Director 1.5.3.
Universal video embedding allows you to quickly copy and paste embed code from Director to your HTML document. The embed code — which will look very familiar if you have been using Director’s built-in slideshow publishing — creates a poster image using your assigned video preview with a play button drawn on top. Once the poster is clicked, the embed library attempts to play the video using the HTML5 video element. If the browser doesn’t support the new video element or the video codec that is being used, it automatically falls back to the SlideShowPro player for video playback. The result is a system for embedding videos that works consistently and transparently on mobile and desktop systems.
Consult the wiki for more on using the new video embedding system. Director 1.5.3 is available now via the in-app update system or the account center. If you are a SlideShowPro.com customer, you already have the update and are ready to go.
SlideShowPro Director WordPress plugin now available
We’re happy to report that our new SlideShowPro Director WordPress plugin is “final” and now available for download or automatic installation through the WordPress control panel (recommended).
In case you haven’t been following our news lately, this plugin allows you to insert images and videos from SlideShowPro Director (self-install or through SlideShowPro.com) into WordPress blog posts/pages. You may browse all your uploaded content while editing a post within the WordPress control panel and choose how you’d like your images to be sized, cropped, and aligned. For video, the plugin embeds H.264 videos using the HTML5 video element and falls back to the (Flash based) SlideShowPro Player if the video is a different codec or the browser can’t display the video on its own. When used with H.264 videos, the latter gives you a hassle free method for deploying videos that will display across all desktops and mobile devices.
Here’s a couple of plugin screenshots:
A special thanks to all those who tested the beta version of the plugin. Your feedback, troubleshooting and support was very much appreciated and helped make the 1.0 release better and more stable.
We’ll continue to update and improve the plugin going forward, so if you have any feedback please contact us. We’d love to hear from you.
File upload problem with SlideShowPro Director, OS X and Flash Player 10.2
UPDATE (3/4/11): Google Chrome’s embedded Flash Player has now been updated as well. Uploading works as expected.
UPDATE (2/28/11): Adobe notified us that they’ve fixed file uploading in the latest version of Flash Player 10.2 for OS X (10.2.152.33). We’ve tested it, and it works! You may now update your Safari / Firefox plugin here. They’ve also let us know that a fix is coming very soon for Flash Player bundled in Google Chrome (OS X).
If you or a client use Mac OS X and SlideShowPro Director there’s something important you should be aware of. The most recent build of Adobe Flash Player 10.2 for Mac OS X — bundled in Google Chrome and currently available for download from Adobe.com — causes file uploading to stall and hang indefinitely. This does not appear to affect the Windows version of the Flash Player.
If you use OS X and aren’t sure which version of the Flash Player you have installed, click here. If you see “10,2″ at the beginning, you are affected by this and won’t be able to upload through your web browser. If not, you’re fine and should avoid updating your Flash Player for the time being.
If you have 10.2 installed, here are a few immediate workarounds.
Option 1: Uninstall Flash Player 10.2, install Flash Player 10.1
Uninstall Flash Player 10.2 from Safari and Firefox by following these instructions. Once Flash Player 10.2 is uninstalled from your computer, download and install Flash Player 10.1. Install the most recent version of 10.1 then restart Safari/Firefox. Uploading will work again as normal.
Note: if you use Google Chrome for OS X, the Flash Player is bundled in the browser and cannot be removed or replaced. The Player will automatically update itself along with general browser updates.
Option 2: FTP upload
If you use the self-install version of SlideShowPro Director you may upload photos/videos using an FTP client. We provide FTP upload instructions here.
Option 3: Adobe Lightroom plugin
If you have Adobe Lightroom you may use our free Lightroom export plugin to upload photos to SlideShowPro Director.
Option 4: Wait
If you don’t need to upload content to SlideShowPro Director anytime soon, there’s no harm in waiting. This bug has been submitted to Adobe’s Flash Player development team, and they’re usually proactive when it comes to addressing problems like these. Chances are a Flash Player 10.2 update for OS X will be released in the near future.
If you have any questions concerning this, feel free to contact us.
SlideShowPro Player patch released to fix full screen issue
This week Adobe released Flash Player 10.2, which ushered in a number of improvements and optimizations, but also (unfortunately) caused the SlideShowPro Player to not scale properly when viewed full screen.
Today we’re releasing updates to all applicable products that resolves the full screen issue so the player scales as expected. Here are update instructions for each product.
SlideShowPro Director (self-install)
Sign-in to your installation of SlideShowPro Director and follow the prompt to automatically update. If you are a SlideShowPro.com subscriber your installation has already been updated, so you don’t need to do anything.
SlideShowPro Player for Flash (AS3)
Only the ActionScript 3 version of the component was affected. If you have the ActionScript 3 component installed, uninstall it through Adobe Extension Manager, then download SlideShowPro Player for Flash 1986 through the account center. Install that extension, then update FLAs using older versions of the component by following these instructions. Once the component and your FLAs are updated you may then publish new SWFs for your site(s).
SlideShowPro Player SWF
Like the Flash component, this was patched with the full screen fix (but keeps its current version number, 1986). To update your slideshows, sign-in to the account center, download SlideShowPro Player SWF, then update any SWF you currently have on your site (or installation of SlidePress). Once replaced the slideshow will function as expected in full screen.
SlideShowPro Player for Lightroom
No update is required! Full screen works fine.
Questions?
If you have any questions concerning this update feel free to contact us.
For those of you who use our SlideShowPro.com service for worry-free Director installs, you have no doubt noticed that we haven’t quite lived up to that “worry-free” promise over the last few weeks. As SlideShowPro.com became more popular among our users, our infrastructure struggled to keep up and as a result some users saw slower than normal response times, while others were left with nearly unusable installations at times. We’ve been hard at work for the last week, making small gains each day, and are now glad to say that SlideShowPro.com is back to normal and perhaps better than ever. For those interested, here’s a rundown of what happened and the steps we’ve taken to resolve this problem — and hopefully prevent it from happening again.
The Cause
There was not a single event that led to these issues, rather a tipping point was reached sometime in mid to late January that saw some degradation in response times, particularly when using Director. As the problems spread, public facing content — in the form of slideshows and API based content — began to exhibit issues as well. The growth of SlideShowPro.com had placed a strain on the existing infrastructure to the point where it had to queue up requests until resources became available. As more and more responses got stacked up in the queue, things would grind to a halt.
The Remedy
We tackled the problem on several fronts. First, a misconfiguration was causing cached files not be recognized, increasing load unnecessarily on our application servers and storage node. We also were not properly utilizing the infrastructure that we had, so we reconfigured our 5 server cluster to better deal with the challenges we were facing. We now have redundant web servers out front for the fast delivery of static and cached contents. We also added a third application server to deal with the increase of PHP requests. Finally, we identified areas where we could more aggressively cache parts of the interface to both speed up page load times and decrease the pressure on the applications servers.
The Future
One key lesson we learned during this incident was that while we were monitoring our application externally, we needed more granular checks in place in order to identify weaknesses in our infrastructure before they spread and cause application wide issues. We’ve done that and hope that goes a long way in identifying and preventing issues in the future. Also, while we think SlideShowPro.com is running very well at the moment, we still think there is room for improvement and will continue to optimize parts of the application to allow for growth in the future.
We’d like to thank our loyal SlideShowPro.com customers for their patience. Many of you provided helpful information that helped us identify exactly where the issues were coming from. We understand that you’ve built sites and applications on top of our service and when our service suffers, you suffer along with it. One of the reasons for this post is to show you just how seriously we take that responsibility. We’re very sorry for the trouble this has caused you and we will be vigilant in the future to make sure it doesn’t happen again. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
We’ve updated our examples page with ten new examples from the SlideShowPro community. Congratulations to Marco Di Lauro, Pixel Story, Janette Gloor, Vélo Papillon, Michael Blondo, Reinhard M. Werner, Biscuit, Patrick Ibanez, Jean Luc Francaise, and the Untitled Gallery. If you’d like to submit your work for consideration next month, submit your example here.
Beta 3 of the SlideShowPro Director WordPress plugin now available
A third public beta of our new SlideShowPro Director plugin for WordPress is now available for download. This release includes a few new and improved features based on user feedback, including:
Use as featured image
This allows you to publish a photo as the featured image of your WordPress theme. Option is not available if your theme doesn’t support featured images or if the original asset is smaller than the featured image area.
Constrain proportions
Proportional scaling is now calculated for you automatically when entering custom image sizes. This is turned on by default, but you can uncheck it for cropped images at specific dimensions.
Image hyperlinks
Mimicking WordPress’ own behavior when inserting images, the plugin now wraps all images with a hyperlink to the original uploaded asset (in SlideShowPro Director). This is turned on by default, but you can turn it off globally in the Settings > SlideShowPro area.
We’ve also updated the video embedding functionality to prepare for Google Chrome’s eventual removal of native H.264 playback support. Whenever Google releases that Chrome update, H.264 videos will be served through the (Flash based) SlideShowPro Player instead. This release also includes a few small fixes and general behind-the-scenes improvements.
If all goes well, this should be the final beta. We encourage all interested in the plugin to test it out and let us know if you see any problems!
Today we’re pleased to announce that Lauren Smith has joined SlideShowPro as our new full-time Senior Web Application Engineer.
Lauren has worked as a front-end developer for a wide variety of clients and businesses, including everything from Fortune 500 companies down to week-old startups. He’s well-versed in JavaScript, ActionScript, PHP, MySQL, and enjoys nothing more than reading/writing JSON/XML and building dynamic, data-centric applications. Lauren’s work has been nominated for Webby, and has received numerous awards and features from a variety of web design publications.
Lauren will be an integral part of our core development team working on new product initiatives. We’re thrilled to have him!
Today we’re starting a new feature where we interview people from the SlideShowPro community to learn more about them and their work. We’re pleased to kick the series off with Julie Grahame, Editor in Chief of the online photography magazine aCurator.
Tell us a bit about your background in photography and how that led to aCurator.
I ran a photo agency for 16 years. We syndicated pictures of famous people and events, working with hundreds of suppliers around the world. In 1992 I had visited the Time Life archives and, with my hands in the Elizabeth Taylor files, full of unseen images, I began to dream of publishing a magazine. Many moons later, when my work day with the agency changed from editing images to managing servers, I decided to get out. Experience working at ZOOZOOM — an early, Webby-winning full screen magazine — helped me understand more about digital production and the web. With Mike Hartley of bigflannel and SlideShowPro I was able to launch aCurator.
How do you typically find photographers to feature? Or do they find you?
Happily, both. There are of course more ways to find great photography than ever. Photographers are embracing blogging and social networking and it has really helped me find content I would never otherwise have come across. I receive submissions too. Photographers want to see their work published in this format, and the photo community has been really supportive. I’m lucky to be in New York, so I get to go to exhibitions and other photography-related events, plus I do portfolio reviews for trade groups. The magazine is such a great profile for images that organizations such as the Aperture Foundation and art galleries want to see their exhibitions published in it.
When considering a photographer’s work — for aCurator or elsewhere — what characteristics or hallmarks do you typically look for?
For aCurator, I like to see a story in the work; I want to feel something and experience something when I’m looking at photographs and I want there to be a flow across the feature. The work must be of a professional quality, even if the photographer is not a professional, and I prefer to edit the images myself. If I’m looking at a newer, less well established photographer, I prefer to run work that has not been over-exposed online.
A photographer just recently told me he uses aCurator in his class teaching students about project photography where the students get to declare a project, write up a project statement and then spend the semester working on it – that made me proud!
This is probably like asking a parent who’s their favorite child, but in the aCurator archives, are there any features that are especially personal to you?
I’ve felt quite honored to publish each one and as I’m looking across the whole thing, I’m still passionate about them all. The Queer Kids feature spread to a couple of major publications that published it after I did, making me really happy for the photographer.
I suppose all of the features that have a political bent are personal. I randomly noticed Leah Geisler following me on Twitter, went to her website and fell in love with this woman photographing 25 non-profits in S. America while she’s 25 years old. If I can help expose young artists I’m thrilled.
Also, as someone whose first job in photography was developing and printing snaps at a local retailer, I look at John Cyr’s Developer Tray series, and I personally enjoy the juxtaposition of these famous photographer’s analog tools, photographed on film, and published online.
Any advice or tips for non-professional photographers looking to improve their portfolio of work?
As Yousuf Karsh said — and forgive me paraphrasing — just because you have eyes and a camera doesn’t mean you can see. So, look a lot. Shoot a lot. Get someone else to edit your images. Don’t overwork your files. Think about what you’d say if someone asked you why you took a particular photograph. Join a trade organization and take advantage of portfolio reviews.
Looking forward, what’s next for aCurator? Print perhaps? Or will the web continue to be your focus?
I would love to go to print. A magazine or a newspaper, cost-permitting, or perhaps on-demand. Would also love to have an offline exhibition.
I plan on more cross-fertilization with other photography websites and organizations. If I can generate a little income to help with costs, and enable me to expand and pay the contributors something, that would be great.
Visit aCurator to see more. Also sign up for their email newsletter to be notified of new features. We’ll post our next interview in February.
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