SlideShowPro News

12.27.06 | Director 1.0.8 Released

After a few weeks of beta testing, we're happy to announce that Director 1.0.8 is ready for public consumption.

In case you haven't been following along, the highlight of this release is an overhauled uploading process, making it much easier to upload your images to both new and existing albums. The new uploader also reports upload progress, another oft-requested feature.

Other noteworthy changes include IE 7 compatibility and image sorting presets. You can see a detailed list of changes in the version history. The Director user guide has also been reworked to bring it in line with this new release.

If you are upgrading a previous version of Director to 1.0.8, please carefully read the upgrade.txt file found in your upgrade package, as the upgrade process is slightly different for 1.0.8.

12.22.06 | Delicious Days

Delicious Days, a popular weblog about cooking, food, and recipes, is using SlideShowPro on photo gallery page. They're using the new "Thumb Crop to Fit" Album Type to use images for their album links. They've also added external navigation to control their slide show. All together, a polished, professional look.

Jumpgallery

Jumpgallery.com is using SlideShowPro to showcase photographer portfolios. Simplicity is the key to their design, which opens full screen and presents large images in a style that's close to the "Floating photos" example on this site. But jumpgallery takes it a step further by building their own rollover for the artist portfolios link that matches the style of SlideShowPro's thumbnail preview boxes; thus making them feel like a connected unit. The artists portfolios links use SlideShowPro's loadAlbum() method to retrieve their requisite albums. A simple, nice example of SSP in action.

Update (6/30/07): Jump Gallery has redesigned since this entry. They're still using SlideShowPro and SlideShowPro Director to host/publish their photos, but the presentation of SlideShowPro has changed. They're now using a simple navigation external to SlideShowPro in the lower-right, plus a fancy thumbnail navigation that appears when you rollover a photo. Lots of great photography, as usual, to see as well.

12.21.06 | Director Release Candidate Available

After positive reports with the betas for Director 1.0.8 and a few final bug fixes, a release candidate for 1.0.8 is now available for download. There are no known issues with this release, and if all goes well it will be released as final sometime next week.

Most of this update is fixing things found in the beta phase, but one enhancement of note is even more functionality for Director's new uploader. You can now select full size images, thumbnails, your album thumb and even audio, then upload it all at once. Try it out, we think you'll like it.

Before upgrading, be sure to check this thread in the forum for the proper upgrading process. We'd also appreciate your feedback (good or bad) here.

12.19.06 | Director 1.0.8 Beta 2 available

The Director 1.0.8 beta series continues to roll along with beta 2, now available for download.

This release patches a few issues found with the first beta, but also adds a new feature: Smart image sorting. You now have three additional options (aside from manually dragging and dropping them into the desired order) for sorting images within an album. These three options are: filename, date (newest first) and date (oldest first). Of course, Director remembers these values and automatically reapplies them when new images are uploaded, making it possible to always have the freshest images show up first (or last) in the album.

If you would like to test this new version, read this post first to see if any of the outstanding issues are a show-stopper for you. Remember, it is still beta, so use caution before updating any production sites.

Thanks for testing!

12.17.06 | User Guide update

Published a small update to SlideShowPro's User Guide this morning. The "Display your slide show online" chapter has been completely rewritten to hopefully make the process of embedding SWFs in HTML documents not published by Flash a little easier. The 1.4.2 download has been updated, but you can also download the guide directly from here.

12.11.06 | Director 1.0.8 Beta available

A beta release of Director 1.0.8 is now available for download. This release fixes a few bugs from the alpha release a few days ago, plus a big plus for Windows users: IE 7 compatibility. To read more about what's in this release, and how to provide feedback (please do!), see this forum thread.

12.07.06 | Will Yurman Photography

Will Yurman is using SlideShowPro on his photography portfolio site, and updates it every day with a new image. He customized the component with his own help button/layer at the far right of the navigation bar, and is also loading each photo through a SWF that presents its own type of image caption (instead of using SlideShowPro's built in caption). Beyond SlideShowPro, his portfolio is full of stunning work, and is really worth exploring.

SlideShowPro Director 1.0.8 alpha released

An alpha release of SlideShowPro Director version 1.0.8 is now available for Director users to download from the Director download page. This includes the awesome new uploading utility I wrote about a few weeks ago. There are some caveats though you should be aware of, so if you're interested in kicking the tires be sure to read this thread first. It contains important information about upgrading and what's supported.

12.03.06 | New examples section

The site has been updated with a new Examples section. It was built to demonstrate the variety of ways SlideShowPro can be configured to achieve different types of styles, behaviors, and layouts. It contains four right now, and more will be added in the weeks to come.