Grab some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy our newest skin – Projector. It was made to offer the best slideshow experience. Yet we didn’t forget about popular features like search, tags, or maps like those found in Tiger skin.
The layout consists of 3 main sections: the sidebar (function buttons), the cover page (folder info, subfolders), and the lightbox (with the thumbnail strip).
You can choose from 3 different layouts for the “cover page”, see Settings / Projector / Cover page / Title / Type:
The lightbox shows the slide images in a full window, and all the other page elements are designed to be the least distractive. It works fine on mobiles; you can even flip through the album with swipe gestures.
The thumbnail strip can be placed in any corner: left, right, above, or below the picture –it’s up to you. During slideshows, the thumbnails get hidden. Similarly, the captions on the photos can be moved to your liking – even in the middle of the image.
The idea came from our WordPress plugin, which was made to showcase jAlbum-made albums within blog posts (or any page). With that plugin, you can choose from a handful of spectacular transition effects, making it popular amongst WordPress users. We thought this could make a great new jAlbum skin.
There are 9 transition effects available in Projector, of which three work in 3D, see Settings / Projector / Lightbox / Main image / Transition. Click the pictures below to see them working!
Speaking of the styles, Projector has inherited Tiger’s 27 styles, so you can easily reproduce the same feel. Naturally, you can customize all the colors, fonts, background images, and many more aspects, similar to Tiger skin. You can add your logo, custom links, and custom content to many places. All the custom pages have received a facelift too, to match the new design.
Technically, the skin is based on the so-called “flex layout”, which offers the best flexibility in arranging and aligning the page sections on different devices. Today all modern browsers support this new layout mode. Internet Explorer 10 and below are not (you guessed), but fortunately, their market share has already dropped below 1%. (The poor implementation of 3D effects in Internet Explorer 11 results in a flawed viewing experience with 3D transition types: Cube, Book, Flip).
When you select Projector from the skin selector all the matching settings will be imported from Tiger, Turtle, or Photoblogger, because they all belong to the same “skin family”. (If you’re on jAlbum 16 or older, the settings will be imported even from the Empty project! Pay attention!) This feature makes transitions from one skin to another easy, but not all settings work equally well with Projector. For example, the thumbnail sizes have to be adjusted to play nicely with the new skin. So visit Settings / Images / Image bounds / Thumbnails and set 90x90 or something similarly small, as larger thumbnails take too much space from the images.
Soon, Projector will receive even more of Tiger’s advanced features, like the shopping cart and feedback.
Comments are welcome, but please post bug reports in the skin’s forum.
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