After a month and a half of extensive beta testing and feedback, we're thrilled to announce that Director 1.5 is now final and ready to go! Nearly a thousand people tested the beta, and we received a massive amount of constructive feedback along the way. We greatly appreciate the support from everyone who participated.

Director 1.5 is a major (and free!) update to the content management system that not only provides integrated slideshow publishing (using the SlideShowPro Player) but also offers an entirely new HTML5 photo and video player for iPhones, iPads and Android devices. The HTML5 player runs in the web browser, so there's no applications or plugins for the user to install. It runs in their web browser, is accessed through your own web site, and allows the same content from your Flash slideshow to be browsed with touch controls (including swipe!) using the largest amount of screen real estate possible. Director 1.5 gives publishers the ability to deploy rich, dynamic media content that is universally accessible across virtually every possible device that may access your web site.

If you are a SlideShowPro Director user that didn't participate in the beta, you can catch up on what's new in our updated wiki.

If you have a self-installation of SlideShowPro Director, you may upgrade using the application's built-in updater. Simply sign-in to Director on your server and click the upgrade notice at the top. If your installation of Director is older (and doesn't support auto upgrading), please see these upgrade instructions.

If you have a SlideShowPro Director hosting subscription, we plan on updating everyone’s installation this weekend (so disruptions, if any, are kept to a minimum). Subscribers should stay tuned to the slideshowpro.com status site for updates. We'll also send an email when everything has been updated.

The 1.5 update to SlideShowPro Director is a major one, for it not only includes an entirely new HTML5 media player, but also offers integrated slideshow publishing using the SlideShowPro Player (thus removing - for some users - the necessity of purchasing the player separately). As a result, we'll be raising the price of the product to $59. However, for those who've been waiting to purchase SlideShowPro Director until the 1.5 beta was over, and for those existing users who will be purchasing additional copies for client projects, we're going to keep the price at $39 until October 1, 2010. That gives everyone a month to purchase as many copies of SlideShowPro Director 1.5 as you want at $20 less than the new retail price that will go info effect. SlideShowPro Director subscription pricing will remain the same.

Earlier this month we released a 1.9.8.5 update to both SlideShowPro for Flash and SlideShowPro Standalone that ushered in the usual round of player refinements, plus a few new features.

New features include:

1) "Loop" playback option. This allows you to turn on/off boundary detection at the beginning and end of an album. By turning it on, you can navigate from the first asset back to the last, and vice versa. This works with the navigation bar, content area navigation, and public methods called via ActionScript.

2) "Fixed" rollover captions. We've extended the "Fixed" caption style so it now offers rollover variants. This allows the Fixed style to appear/disappear on rollover in a manner similar to the default "Overlay on Rollover" style.

3) Caption design changes and extra options. The default caption appearance has been updated with a uniform background style, plus additional styling options for applying separate padding and color values to the caption title. This gives designers more flexibility over the appearance of captions.

There are a number of other tweaks/improvements to the player you can read about at the wiki.

For those of you using SlideShowPro for Lightroom, an update that incorporates 1985 (plus other updates) is coming in early September.

Every month users of our products submit examples to us, and from those we hand-pick the ten most interesting, beautiful, and/or creative submissions and feature them here. Congratulations to all our Site of the Month honorees. If your site is here, you're entitled to a free SlideShowPro T-shirt. Contact us if you'd like one and we'll mail one out!

SITES OF THE MONTH (AUGUST 2010):

Stanley Chang SlideShowPro Player, ThumbGrid, Director	Adam Lerner SlideShowPro Player
Fredrik Ödman SlideShowPro Director API, Custom Flash	Mike Hill Design SlideShowPro Player, ThumbGrid, Director
Erik Zappon SlideShowPro Director API, Custom Flash	Julien Aguet SlideShowPro Player
Richard Bernardin SlideShowPro Player, Director, ThumbGrid	Erika Ashauer SlidePress, SlideShowPro Standalone
Demond Meek SlideShowPro player, ThumbGrid, Director	Wanamaker SlidePress, SlideShowPro Standalone

Want to submit your own site for next month's roundup? Click here to share it with us.