Beta 2 of SlideShowPro Director WordPress plugin now available
A second beta for our new SlideShowPro Director plugin for WordPress is now available for testing. This release resolves a few issues that popped up after the first beta was released a couple of weeks ago. If you use WordPress and SlideShowPro Director and would like to test it out, click the button below.
If this is your first time installing the plugin, click here for manual installation instructions. If you have feedback or experience something that doesn’t look right, contact us.
SlideShowPro Director plugin for WordPress now available
Today we’re releasing a public beta of a new WordPress plugin for inserting photos and videos from SlideShowPro Director. Here’s a screenshot of what the main interface looks like:
It’s all very easy and straightforward. Simply click the SlideShowPro arrow icon while editing a blog post and a dialogue will appear displaying your most recently uploaded photos/videos (above).
To insert a photo or video, click its thumbnail. An overlay window will appear (screenshot below). If your WordPress theme supports it, the plugin will detect the width of your blog post column and offer a proportionally scaled size. This makes the inserted photo flush with the left and right sides of your blog posts. If not, or you want to insert a different size or format, you can do that too. Titles, captions and hyperlinks are pulled in from SlideShowPro Director, which can be edited or erased.
For videos, the plugin supports H.264, FLV and F4V. If embedding an H.264 video, and the person viewing your blog is using a modern web browser that supports HTML5 video and H.264 playback (which includes nearly all except Firefox and older versions of IE), the video will be displayed using the browser’s native video player. If HTML5 playback isn’t possible, the Flash-based SlideShowPro Player is used as a fallback. Below is a screenshot of an embedded H.264 video in Chrome:
This WordPress plugin is 100% free and compatible with SlideShowPro Director 1.5 or higher (and all SlideShowPro.com subscriptions). Simply enter your Director API info, save, and go!
This plugin is technically a beta, so there will almost certainly be some kinks that need ironing out. Once a final release is ready we’ll post it to the WordPress plugin directory so everyone can download / update the plugin automatically.
Want to help kick the tires? Click the button below. For manual installation instructions, click here.
Note: Some of you may be wondering…wait a second…wasn’t this supposed to be a feature of SlidePress 2? Yes, back in October we teased photo/video inserting from SlideShowPro Director as one of SlidePress 2′s planned features. But since then we decided the functionality would be better served through a standalone plugin. Both plugins will work just fine alongside each other.
SlideShowPro Director AS3 API kit released
Today we’re happy to announce that our new SlideShowPro Director AS3 API kit is out of beta and available for download.
What is it? It’s an ActionScript 3 library that provides a core set of classes, methods and utilities to load SlideShowPro Director content. Flash developers can use it to dynamically request any album, gallery, image and/or video from a self-installation of SlideShowPro Director or from a SlideShowPro.com subscription.
Use it to build full-blown portfolio sites, photo galleries, slideshows, or…whatever you want! The API gives Flash developers everything they need to use SlideShowPro Director as the dynamic media publishing backend for any project.
The kit is free and includes complete documentation, an example FLA and document class, plus the ActionScript library as a compiled SWC and in raw class form. To download, sign-in to the account center, then click the “Accessories” tab on your profile page.
Have fun Flash devs! And if you build something using the kit, share it with us. We’d love to see it.
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.
By design, ThumbGrid leverages SlideShowPro for Flash for all the data and content it receives. This keeps ThumbGrid lightweight and ensures the two components are always in sync.
This also means (when used with SlideShowPro Director) that image size requests for ThumbGrid have to be made to SlideShowPro for Flash because it’s the component calling the shots. Well, no more.
With version 2.1, ThumbGrid now requests its own images from SlideShowPro Director; giving users perfectly formatted thumbnail images without any parameter edits to SlideShowPro for Flash. And it’s done without having to make two separate data assignments. ThumbGrid still uses the same data SlideShowPro for Flash uses, but it now makes its own separate content request from SlideShowPro Director to obtain images at the exact sizes it needs (for both the Gallery and Album screens). If you change the dimensions of ThumbGrid with setSize(), ThumbGrid will make another request from Director for a new set of images. This makes it much easier for new users of ThumbGrid to get perfectly formatted results right out of the box.
Additionally, ThumbGrid 2.1 changes the “Scroll Slow” Interactivity setting to “Scroll Normal” and revises “Scroll Slow” to now be slower, with rollover areas that are pushed further towards the component’s edges.
Also, album thumbnails on the Gallery screen now change to an “active” appearance when their content is loaded in SlideShowPro for Flash, and we’ve added “Active Filter” and “Rollover Filter” settings that (along with the existing “Inactive Filter” setting) provide filter options for every possible thumbnail state.
Registered users of ThumbGrid 2 can download this free update from account center. If you’re a ThumbGrid 1.0 user, you can purchase an ThumbGrid 2 upgrade for $15.
Looking for SlideShowPro Director ActionScript API beta testers
We’re looking for a few seasoned Flash developers who know ActionScript 3 to help privately beta test (and use in actual work, if you’d like) our new SlideShowPro Director ActionScript API library. Beta testers should have at least an intermediate proficiency with ActionScript 3, though advanced skills will be required to effectively use it. If this sounds like you, please contact us for more information. Be sure to select “Beta testers” as the support topic, and feel free to include information about your experience and/or links to Flash content you’ve developed.
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!
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