SlideShowPro News

06.30.05 | Automator workflow available

My friend Nathan Steiner cooked up a handy little Automator workflow for SlideShowPro. It takes a folder of JPGs and publishes a basic SlideShowPro XML file with all your images linked therein. The workflow requires OS X 10.4 (Tiger), Automator (which comes with the OS) and BBEdit.

Download ssp_automator.zip (61kb)

Note: the download contains both an application version (so you can launch it like a regular app) and the workflow itself for anyone who'd like to customize it to meet their needs, or potentially improve upon it (if you do, le me know!).

06.28.05 | SSPAdmin 1.3 is out

Developer Brad Daily has released SSPAdmin 1.3, his PHP/MySQL administrative software for organizing and compiling your slide shows with SSP. The new version allows the option of uploading a ZIP archive of your images, and SSPAdmin decompresses and organizes your archived images right where they need to go. Very cool. For those of you with PHP and MySQL on your server (or webhost) it's definitely worth looking into.

06.25.05 | SlideShowPro 1.0.9 Released

New in the user section is SlideShowPro 1.0.9, the latest update containing some bug fixes, a few popular requests, and a bunch of code optimization and tweaking. It's a free update to all 1.0 buyers.

What's new includes:

• Improved the "Restart" setting of the "Auto Finish Mode" property so that the final image cross fades into the first (for a more seamless transition). Also, if an album's audio is currently playing, the audio is not stopped. If audio has completed by the time an album is restarted, the audio will begin playback as normal.
• Gallery screen navigation now appears only if more than one screen is available.
• If a loaded image or swf has neither a caption nor a hyperlink, the rollover layer is not activated. This allows swfs containing buttons to be clicked.
• Javascript window pop-up code may now be included with image links in the XML.
• New property: Image Align. You may now choose the alignment of your loaded images within SlideShowPro. Options are "Top Left," "Top Right," "Bottom Right," "Bottom Left," and "Center" (default).
• Image navigation with the keyboard (Space, Left, Right) now remains active when "Show Navigation" is set to "False."
• Bug Fix: If the gallery pane was open while SlideShowPro automatically switched to the next album, and the user clicked on a different album, everything would go a little crazy. This has been fixed.
• Bug Fix: The bottom stroke of a caption would occasionally appear at the top of the component while hidden off screen. This has been fixed.
• Revamped caption-related code. A little leaner, maybe a little faster
• Lots of code optimizations and tweaks
• Updated User Guide

As usual, instructions on how to install the updated component and how to update movies created with older versions of the component is in the User Guide. Have fun!

06.14.05 | slideshowpro.com

When registering a domain for SlideShowPro earlier this year, ".net" was the only decent domain available. ".com" had already been registered, and wouldn't be available for quite some time (if ever). As luck would have it though, the owner of "slideshowpro.com" wasn't doing anything with it -- the domain merely pointed to one of those generic registrar search portal pages. That is, until today. I've successfully acquired slideshowpro.com, and have temporarily set it up as a redirect to the existing .net content, and will soon work towards moving everything under the .com domain.

Part of the reason why I wanted .com was because of the most popular search engine queries used to find this site. Day after day, the top three search engine queries have been "slideshowpro," "slideshow pro," and "slide show pro." Chances are, half of these queries were by people who had heard or seen the name and tried to load the most obvious domain -- slideshowpro.com -- but had to resort to a search engine to find the actual ".net" domain.

I also wanted to protect my marketplace identity, for lord knows how angry I'd be if someone else acquired it and released a competing product with the same name. Plus, it just sounds better.

So no need to change your bookmarks just yet, but items may shift while in flight.