Big news over at SimpleViewer.net – SimpleViewer, the free customizable Flash image gallery has been upgraded to version 2.0. Check out a run-down of the new features here and grab yourself a copy here.
Category Archives: Photography
SWFAddress Gotcha: Navigating Directly to a Deep Link Breaks Preloader
There is a known issue with SWFAddress 2.2: When navigating directly to a deep link, the preloader does not display or jumps straight to 100%. When using the ‘#’ symbol in the URL, the browser loads the main SWF twice which cause the preloader to break.
The fix is to use a mini pre-preloader as supplied in the SWFAddress samples (‘samples/cs3/c.fla’). The mini-loader is loaded twice but since it’s so small it doesn’t matter. I’m adding this information here since the issue is pretty buried in the SWFAddress forum.
[UPDATE] OK, another SWFAddress gotcha by virtue of obscurity: If your back button is not working, check you have specified the ‘id’ attribute in the swfobject.embedSWF() call. The ‘id’ attribute can be any string.
swfobject.embedSWF('c.swf?path=main.swf', 'flashContent', '100%', '100%', '9.0.45', null, {}, {}, {id: 'myId'});
New Photoshop Scripts for Airtight Viewers
Jeff Tranberry over at Adobe just built a new set of Photoshop scripts for SimpleViewer, TiltViewer, AutoViewer and PostcardViewer. These scripts allow you to easily create Airtight galleries with Photoshop CS3 and up. Just select your image folder and gallery options to instantly create a gallery.
Custom Portraits by Paul Turner
I just built a website for my dad, Paul Turner. He’s a very talented portrait painter (among other things) who is starting to sell custom portraits on the web. I sent him a digital photo of my son, Caspar, and 2 weeks later I received a very nice pop-art style portrait printed on fibreboard and ready to hang. It always get compliments from guests. So support an independent artist and get yourself a portrait!
Another talented artist in my family is Abby Stiglets, who has some of her strange and beautiful paintings on display here.
PostcardViewer Update
I completed the viewer update trifecta – PostcardViewer has been updated to v1.2.
I actually re-wrote the code from scratch, since the previous code was starting to show it’s age. The main new feature is captions. Since the images are rotated slightly the text requires an embedded font to render. This means that non-english characters, italics and bold are not supported (PostcardViewer-Pro allows you embed different character sets as required). View the complete list of updates here.
I always liked this viewer since it is very simple but fun and effective. It uses Flash’s fast scaling code to produce nice zooming transitions. About the image rotation in PCV – a few people have complained that the rotation degrades image quality. I think the slight rotation adds a subtle real-world cue that makes the images more visually interesting and ‘real’. Think about it – when you look at a set of actual photos, they are not all perfectly perpendicular to each other. Your brain does a fine job of working out which direction is up and which direction is down within the image. Let’s break free of the tyranny of the 90 degree angle 
(PCV-Pro allows you to disable the image rotation).
PostcardViewer-Pro customers are notified via email when there is an update. All 1.x updates are provided free of charge.
SimpleViewer v1.8.5 Released
When I first created SimpleViewer back in 2003, it was mainly a reaction against the multitude of bad web photo galleries that were out there. The idea was to create a gallery that was simple, unobtrusive and usable. I did not expect 5 years later that it would be getting over 15,000 downloads a week!.
This popularity has spurred me to keep improving the gallery. The 1.8.5 updates include:
- Added full localization support
- Allow direct links to images within gallery
- Added PNG and GIF support (publishing to Flash 8 )
- Added 3 new XML options: vAlign, hAlign, navPadding. These improve layout for small format galleries.
- Added 5 new Pro AS options: showCaptionOnRollover, captionUnderThumbs, captionFontSize, titleFontSize, captionPadding
- Allow setting caption and title colors via HTML font tags
As usual, these new features are mainly based on the awesome feedback that comes from the forums. Unfortunately due to the high volume of posts I do not have time to answer each one, but I do read every post and take note of the issues raised.
SimpleViewer-Pro customers are notified via email when there is an update. All 1.x updates are provided free of charge.
Please download the latest version, give it a whirl and let me know if you see any bugs. Thanks!
