SlideShowPro News

06.27.06 | Jamie Krueger

Simple, elegant, and easy to navigate, photographer Jamie Krueger has a beautiful portfolio site powered by SlideShowPro. Nearly all his photos are in black and white, and the interface is crisp, clean, and well designed.

06.26.06 | Forums updated

Just a quick note to announce that the forums have been relaunched. Why the change? Because nobody likes maintaining multiple logins for the same site, so forum logins are now the same as member logins (for product downloads). This means that from now on, every member has a single login for both product downloads and the forums. Yay!

The one caveat of this is that all the old threads from the previous forum are now gone. It was impossible to move the old threads to the new system and maintain authorship in the process. So the only way around it was to start over. This sucks in the short term, but will make everyone's lives easier going forward.

If you aren't sure what your login is, click here to retrieve it. If that doesn't work, drop me a line and I'll get to you as soon as I can.

Thanks for the patience.

06.25.06 | SlideShowPro 1.3.3 Released

A bug popped up with the new "Downscale Only" option for Image Scaling, which was introduced in version 1.3.1. It's been fixed in this release so that it consistently works. Registered users of the component should login and download this release.

06.22.06 | Kody Chamberlain

Designer Kody Chamberlain is using SlideShowPro to present his portfolio of work, from logos to photos, design work and other projects. He's still filling it with content, but already Kody has achieved a very unique look and layout with SlideShowPro, not to mention a really cool looking gallery interface (which is accomplished by loading large album previews that push the text fields out of the way). Well done.

SlideShowPro Director 1.0.4 Released

SlideShowPro Director 1.0.4 has been released and is now available for download. It's a quick release that squashes a few bugs here and there. Nothing major. Feel free to skip this one if you're not experiencing any issues with 1.0.3. Otherwise, login to your member account and download.

06.18.06 | SlideShowPro 1.3.2 Released

This is a quick patch release to fix a preloader issue that popped up in 1.3.1. Registered users may login to the member section to download the update.

06.17.06 | SlideShowPro 1.3.1 Released

SlideShowPro 1.3.1 is now available. What's new? Well, a few things.

One request that has dogged me since the launch of SlideShowPro has been auto/manual playback. Namely, the fact that a slide show can start in Auto mode, but if a user switches albums the slide show switches to Manual. In other words, stops. It's been this way for quite a while, but a number of people talked me into changing it. So now if your slide show starts in "Auto" mode, SSP remembers that setting, and if a user switches albums auto playback is maintained.

Another popular request was image scaling. Ever since 1.0, there has been two options -- scaling, or no scaling. 1.3.1 adds a new option: "Downscale Only." This means that if a slide show image is smaller than the component, it will not be upscaled. But larger images will be proportionally downscaled as always. (Note: for those of you using ActionScript to set this value, the parameter is now a string, and no longer a boolean. So you'll need to update your code).

A new event too -- galleryState -- which broadcasts when the gallery area is open, closed or hidden. This was a popular request with people creating custom navigations.

Then there are a few tweaks including a LivePreview bug with the caption bar, a fix to slide shows that have "Image Fade" set to 0 (hence no transition), and revised behavior for the thumbnail preview box (it only appears if a valid image file is found so you don't see the white box if there's an error).

Last but certainly not least, the "startHere" XML override has been deprecated. It was a bit of a hack from the early days of SSP, and with the much more robust "setStartAlbum()" now the best way to accomplish the same thing (dictating what album to start with), it's a good time to kick it out and optimize the code. So if you're using startHere in your XML, I highly recommend switching over to setStartAlbum().

As always, 1.3.1 is a free update to all registered users. Login to your member account to download.

06.15.06 | Adam McCausland

Designer Adam McCausland has one of the more unique implementations of SlideShowPro with his design and photography gallery. Adam cropped his images with an angled perspective, and they seamlessly appear inside of an ornate frame. Also check out this forum thread for answers on how he implemented the unique treatment.

06.14.06 | Director 1.0.3 final is out

After a number of beta versions released into the wild, the final version of 1.0.3 is ready to roll.

I already wrote about new features in the previous entry, but there's one important update I left out: SlideShowPro Director can now be installed on Windows servers running IIS 5.0+ or Apache 1.3+.

1.0.3 is a free update for all Director users, and is now available in the member section for download. Simply login, click on the Director link under the "Your product purchases" header, and grab the update.

Thanks to all the beta testers who helped kick the tires for this important update.

06.02.06 | Director 1.0.3 beta released

For all you Director users out there hop on over to the Director product page to check out a beta release of the next update, version 1.0.3. Please note that this should only be used by those interested in testing new features, which include complete image processing (Director now generates optimized versions of large photos in addition to thumbnails if you don't want to pre-process your slide show imagery using a desktop app), image rotation, navigation between images in the Edit Images pane, a revised layout for the Generate Content tab, additional formatting options for generating image captions, faster rendering of preview images in the Edit Images tab, and "memory" settings for your album's images so that any new images you upload automatically inherit (and are published with) the values of all the other content in your album.

Since there's lots of new stuff it's best to kick this out the door as a beta before going totally live. So if you kick the tires, please send some feedback -- even if everything functions normally for you. Thanks!