8.0

Released: 2008-05-21

News and updates

• User interface now completely supports drag and drop. Arrange files and folders between folders too
• New image editor with pluggable image filters: crop, red eye, color adjustment (brightness, contrast, saturation), gamma correction, rotate/straighten, grayscale, sepia, sharpen, blur, flip, invert and pixelate. The editor never touches your original images!
• Images having filters applied to them can be saved separately
• Faster and more memory conservative image scaling, especially for very large JPEG images
• Originals can now be included for selected images
• File picker now displays thumbnails
• Faster loading of images lacking embedded thumbnails
• Control-drag folders to have copies generated inside Jalbum containing links to the files in the dragged folder
• Improved image property editor with rating, titles (for images too), file date and comments
• Images can now be rotated and included/excluded in detail view mode
• Filters applied to images can be copied and pasted onto masses of images in a quick way
• Easy access file system from objects inside Jalbum
• Full cacheing of thumbnails for images lacking an embedded thumbnail
• Synchronization between generated files and input files meaning that renames, moves and deletions to images in the input structure are reflected among the album files. No more dead files lurking around (A user preference)
• Old problematic "clean files" function now restricted to the "res" and "gifs" folders
• More powerful ja:fileiterator tag. Should minimize need for scripting for skin developers
• New finally.bsh file for skin clean-up tasks
• Media RSS support
• Widget support
• Preference to control if uploaded images open in browser or not
• Reporting on number of objects, vs selected and excluded objects in Jalbum Explorer status bar
• Modularized architecture (see new "lib" and "ext" folders for future plugins)

Bug fixes

• Proper GPS coordinate reporting
• Broken links are now displayed properly in UI
• Various bug fixes

7.4.1

Released: 2007-12-18

News and updates

• Pure Windows version now compiled and packaged with version 6 of the Excelsior JET compiler
• Updated language files
• Updated camera definition file

Bug fixes

• Installing skins on Vista sometimes failed with an error

7.4

Released: 2007-12-06

News and updates

• User interface redesigned to be more workflow-logical. These changes have been performed after analyzing user behaviour on a test group. I believe these changes will double the number of users that successfully publish albums with Jalbum
• Publish window now capable of password protecting albums hosted on the Jalbum hosting
• Installing skins on Windows Vista now works
• Added skins are now preserved between updates of Jalbum (stored in separate location)
• Improved handling of foreign characters and spaces on Mac
• Jalbum can now help users telling about their new albums after publishing them (via email and web)
• Mac user interface improvements
• Skin developers can now use the new ja:switch and an improved ja:if statement
• New printing partner support - SnapGalaxy
• Ten languages updated. Thank you all translators!
• Bundled skin Chameleon updated to v4.3.1
• Bundled skin BluPlusPlus updated to v4.1.0

Bug fixes

• Making albums with certain skins (using the ${var} syntax) would break after making an album with a compiled skin like Chameleon, BluPlusPlus and ExhibitPlus
• Various bug fixes

7.3.1

Released: 2007-10-20

News and updates

• The slide show can now be exited by going past the end
• Various usability improvements to user interface (folder trees can't be fully collapsed, added tooltips, use of album icon for folder tree etc)
• Jalbum is now smarter regarding what folder to preselect when connecting to a server
• Jalbum will now avoid to propose directory names in publish window that already exists
• Leading and trailing spaces in camera information are now stripped (Olympus cameras had this)
• Added new Tool to reset folder dates to date of most current containing file
• Updated translations. Thank you all translators!
• New language added, Romanian. Thank you Alexandru Bogdan Munteanu

Bug fixes

• Jalbum would trigger a software firewall warning upon startup (when looking for free ports to use for its album sharing server)
• Smart upload was not working with directories containing spaces on ftp server (was uploading everything instead of only changed files)
• Problem uploding to directories containing spaces and not being able to navigate inside such directories in publish window (for ftp servers)
• Compatibility with PositionMap skin was broken
• The delete folder progress dialogue of the publish window wouldn't tell what directory was being deleted
• Jalbum wouldn't respect the "make changes" vs "make all" menu options. Would make according to the main make setting instead.

Known issues

• Installing skins in Vista is broken due to Vistas new security system (which prevents an application to add files under its own installation directory). Workaround: Get the .zip version of skins, unzip manually to the "skins" subdirectory of the Jalbum installation directory.

7.3

Released: 2007-09-30

News and updates

• Files and folders on your desktop can now be dragged and dropped onto the folder tree of the Publish window for publishing. This makes the Publish feature of Jalbum more general so it can be used to maintain not only albums, but your web site too.
• In line with the above, the Publish window can now be set to "advanced mode" where not just folders and albums, but also files can be managed. This mode also allows files to be uploaded to the root of MyAlbum accounts, enabling users to customize their welcome pages.
• The Publish window now orders files and folders alphabetically, folders first.
• The Publish window now shows the size of albums as they are about to be uploaded.
• For Jalbum hosting accounts, the Publish window also shows the account size and space left as albums are about to be uploaded
• More forgiving: Renaming or moving an image directory used by Jalbum outside of Jalbum would often cause broken Jalbum projects (images appearing to be gone as the image directory setting pointed to the old location). Jalbum now repairs a broken image directory reference if found while loading a project. (Jalbum does this by setting the image directory to the same directory as the new project file location)
• Added assistive icons to the Jalbum user interface to make certain Jalbum settings easier to understand
• 17 translations updated. Thank you dear translators!
• Bundled skin XP updated

Bug fixes

• The "Include photographic data in generated images" setting (previously called "Keep photographic data") could cause color distortions with some images. Images also grew more in size than neccesary with this setting
• Jalbum wouldn't show an error if one tried to open a project that couldn't be found
• Renaming a whole album by renaming the root folder (top left of Jalbum window) would cause all kinds of trouble (images and project not being found). Jalbum now takes care of updating references to a renamed album.

Known issues

• Installing skins in Vista is broken due to Vistas new security system (which prevents an application to add files under its own installation directory). Workaround: Get the .zip version of skins, unzip manually to the "skins" subdirectory of the Jalbum installation directory.

7.2.1

Released: 2007-08-02

News and updates

• Improved reporting on what directory is being processed during album making. Previously only the directory name was reported. Now the reporting also includes parent directories (up to the root of the album)
• Made options for inclusion of photographic data more clear to understand
• The build mode ("all" vs "changes") is now remembered with each album project
• Made the server address field of the publish window filter out illegal characters
• The ja:include element again only searches for included pages in the current image directory, the skin directory and the Jalbum "includes" directory. Added the new "root" attribute to search the root image directory only (suitable for including album specific text/code on pages on any directory level)
• Dutch translation updated significantly. Thank you Marcel Daems
• Bundled skin Chameleon updated to v4.2.3

Bug fixes

• The cleaning of old files added to Jalbum 7.2 (see Preferences) also deleted custom files added by skins, like the help file of the Chameleon skin for instance
• Double clicking .jap and .jaskin files didn't work (Since 7.2. Native Windows version only)
• Jalbum left open file handles/locks when processing non JPEG files during album making. This would eventually use up all available file handles and cause Jalbum to halt (Since 6.0)
• When adding and renaming a new folder from within Jalbum and entering it directly, Jalbum would throw a NullPointerException (Since 7.2)
• The reporting on what directory is being processed during album making didn't show on subsequent album makings
• Menu separators would appear transparent when running Jalbum on Java 1.6 and using Windows look & feel. (Now that only applies if one switches back and forth between the Alloy look & feel and the Windows look & feel)

Known issues

• Installing skins in Vista is broken due to Vistas new security system (which prevents an application to add files under its own installation directory). Workaround: Get the .zip version of skins, unzip manually to the "skins" subdirectory of the Jalbum installation directory.

7.2

Released: 2007-06-29

News and updates

• Added option to delete/clean files from previous album builds on "make all" operation. This is now the default behaviour. Deselect this option (preferences window) if you prefer the classic behaviour of not deleting any generated files at all.
• Images and folders can now be ordered irrespectively of each other on a per-folder basis
• Jalbum now remembers the last used ordering and sticks to it when new files are added (instead of adding new files last)
• Images and folders can now be shuffled (ordered randomly)
• When deleting files from the Jalbum thumbnail window they are now moved to the recycle bin instead of permanently deleted (currently only for Windows version)
• Added support for arranging and playing mp3 music files within the client user interface
• Added option to automatically close progress dialog when done making an album
• Added option to set the location of the "My Albums" folder
• Publish window now allows folders residing on a remote server to be moved around with drag and drop
• Publish window now senses folders containing albums and represents those with an album icon
• Publish window now has a button that puts the address for the currently selected album on the clipboard
• Removed "Share" button from main panel (seldomly used, use menu equivalent if needed)
• Removed obsolete "Web host signup wizard" from publish window.
• Added new account activation function to publish window for our Jalbum hosting
• Added used and free disk space reporting to publish window (Jalbum hosting accounts only)
• Various enhancements to publish window
• General Jalbum support files are now placed in a directory called "system". A central cameras.properties file (35mm equivalents database) is maintained within it
• URL encoded links now also have the quote character (') encoded (compatibility with Google images)
• Several languages updated. Thank you all translators!
• Better disposal of used memory during album build
• Mac: window minimization handling
• Mac: menubar icon instead of trayicon
• Bundled skin Chameleon updated to v4.11
• Bundled skin BananAlbum updated to v5.1.3
• Bundled skin ExhibitPlus updated. Also removed ExhibitPlus specific handling from code. Note: From now on, Jalbum won't run properly on older versions of ExhibitPlus and current and future versions of ExhibitPlus require at least this version
• Windows version now compiled with the updated version 5 of the Excelsior JET compiler
• Installer for Java versions updated. Should be more Vista compatible now

Bug fixes

• Jalbum didn't properly wait until "delete directory" operations on a remote server were done
• Publish progress indicator didn't show number of transferred bytes when in secure mode
• Publish window didn't sense changes to projects (actually output directory) while being open
• Various fixes to publish window
• Publishing in command line mode was broken since v7.0
• Jalbum sharing sometimes reported errors even if things worked fine (with older routers)
• If excluding a linked image that was set to be used as folder icon, the folder icon setting was ignored
• Folders that didn't need processing at all could cause problems
• Developers: BeanBinder class didn't pass floats or doubles to setter methods

7.1

Released: 2007-03-13

News and updates

• New skin installer. Simply drag and drop skin files (zipped skin folders) on the skin selector of Jalbum to install a skin. You can also double click .jaskin files to install the contained skins.
• The publish window now allows you to show the full server directory tree so you can publish albums to directories that are outside your sftp home directory.
• File name labels in the thumbnail view are now left justifed instead of centered. (The complete file name is visible as a tooltip when hovering the mouse over the label)
• Jalbum can now restore settings that the layout hints changed when switching skin (leaving settings that have been manually set)
• The "View Album"-button has been added to the main interface again.
• Improved notification upon album build completion if Jalbum has been hidden while building. Windows flash start menu, Mac bounce dock icon.
• Local Path in Share has been made editable so that it's possible to manually move shares.
• New Mac program icons (folders, projects and skinpacks).
• Publish window now accepting F5 keyboard shortcut to refresh the folder tree
• The library for secure ftp support (jsch) updated from 0.1.24 to 0.1.32
• The native Windows version should support Windows Vista now (update to compiler/packager)
• The native Windows version is now bundled with a compiled Java 1.5.0_11 instead of 1.5.0_09
• Catalan language added. Thank you Pau Plana i Salesas
• Several languages updated. Thank you all translators!
• Bundled skin Chameleon updated to v4.0.3
• Bundled skin BananAlbum updated to v5.1

Bug fixes

• The output folder was not reset to "album" when a new album project was created through the menu.
• Folders in the thumbnail explorer view couldn't be double clicked and expanded unless they were already expanded in the tree view.
• The progress bar when building album would sometimes got stuck (due to miscalculations) and it would seem like the build wasn't finished. The progress bar now also clearly indicates when work is done and flashes on the start menu.
• Preferences wasn't loaded if Jalbum was started with a project.
• Smart Upload in the publish section always warned about uploading to the root even if "Show warnings" was deselected.
• Fixes to the Jalbum XML parser (% or \ in attribute values wasn't supported which caused problems when sharing and publishing albums)
• Four Tools were again broken
• New compiler/packager for Windows fixing out of memory issue with multiple CPUs
• Mac - Labels were often abbreviated (even if it wasn't necessary) with ellipsis...
• Mac - Drag and drop from iPhoto to Jalbum (only supported file formats).
• Mac - Drag and drop to Jalbum's dock icon didn't work. Now you can drop projects, images or folders with images on the dock icon.
• Mac - Double clicking project files didn't work if Jalbum wasn't already running.
• Various minor fixes.

7.0.3

Released: 2007-02-08

News and updates

• Jalbum now has three image scaling methods. The classic low and high quality scaling and the scaling method introduced in Jalbum 7 (labeled "medium")
• Bundled skin BluPlusPlus updated to v4
• Bundled skin Chameleon updated to v4.0.2
• Now uses backspace to delete files on Mac instead of delete key
• Settings window is again always on top of main window (previous behaviour sometimes prevented drag and drop on settings window)
• Nicer looking splash screen :-)
• Again does never grab more than 512MB RAM (Jalbum 7.0 was allowed to grab 1GB)
• Defaults to using one thread only (less memory consuming)
• Minor improvement to quality of sharpening algorithm
• Various tweaks to be more memory conservative

Bug fixes

• Didn't respect &aout;number of threads" setting, could cause unneccesary memory load
• Double clicking .jap project files didn't work on compiled Windows version
• "Clear user defined variables" Tool didn't work
• Failed to work with PositionMap skin
• "Force UTF-8" ftp setting wasn't respected
• Caused errors with ftp servers upon reconnection after lost connection during upload
• Tools failed to execute unless image directory was set (fixed in 7.0.2 service release)

7.0.1

Released: 2007-02-02

News and updates

• User inferface now considerably faster in handling huge album projects
• Publish section now supports publishing to servers using symbolic links for directories
• Mac distribution updated to simplify adding skins

Bug fixes

• Four of the external Tools failed to execute
• Chameleon skin didn't properly link to originals
• ExhibitPlus skin wasn't the most recent version (1.4 instead of 1.4a)
• BluPlusPlus skin failed to install on distributions packaged with InstallAnywhere

7.0

Released: 2007-01-30

News and updates

• User interface completely redesigned. The new user interface is intended to be easier to use and more extendable, but not less powerful. Parts of the old tab-based user interface is now hidden under settings windows with only the most frequently used options (skin and style selection) on the main window.
• Now co-developed on Mac and Windows to ensure that Jalbum should look good and work perfect on both systems
• Completely redesigned publish section. The new publish section is also intended to be easier to use, but also more powerful. One can now visually browse a remote server using a directory tree control and manage directories like in any full featured ftp client (add, rename and delete directories).
• Jalbum now allows you to build virtual album structures. You can pick images and folders from anywhere on your harddisk to your album. Just drag and drop them onto Jalbum!
• Improved publishing robustness. Jalbum will now reconnect and reattempt serveral times if a file fails to be published before giving up
• High quality image scaling now considerably faster
• Minor improvements to file sharing user interface
• Jalbum now supports variable image sharpening natively (not just via filter plugin)
• Several languages updated. Thank you all translators!
• Bundled Chameleon skin updated to v4. More powerful and 3 times as fast!
• Bundled the popular Flash based BananAlbum skin (v5.0)
• Bundled BluPlusPlus skin updated to v3.12
• Compiled for Windows with updated Excelsior Jet 4.8 compiler
• Packaged for Mac as a standard dmg distribution

Bug fixes

• Jalbum would often incorrectly report failure when trying to share albums (when behind many recent routers/firewall units)
• Album sharing didn't work behind some Netgear routers
• Jalbum could halt with various scripting errors if one pressed Make album too soon after loading a skin
• Tools could not be executed unless a valid image directory was set

6.5.4

Released: 2006-09-15

News and updates

• Improved Exhibit skin to support information below thumbnails
• Added recognition of Open office and DjVu files.
• Norwegian translation updated and corrected by Svein Kj�r. Thank you.
• Installer updated to version 8

Bug fixes

• Fixed memory leak in XP skin
• Fixed memory leak in Chameleon skin

6.5.3

Released: 2006-08-14

Bug fixes

• JPEG Images with corrupt/non-standard metadata structures could cause an IndexOutOfBoundsException (for instance images written by PhotoStudio 5.5)
• The Edit view left certain image files locked until Jalbum was closed

6.5.2

Released: 2006-08-10

News and updates

• Slovenian translation updated. Thank you Igor Trcek
• Chameleon skin updated to v3.32. Thank you Laza!

Bug fixes

• Fixed memory leak in XP skin
• Fixed memory leak in Chameleon skin

6.5.1

Released: 2006-07-17

News and updates

• Album generation can now be paused and resumed. This can be useful in order to temporarily free up CPU resources during long album builds
• Chameleon skin updated to v3.11. Thank you Laza!
• Slovenian translation added. Thank you Igor Trcek
• Hungarian translation updated. Thank you Laza

Bug fixes

• Thumbnails for vertically oriented images indicating folders wasn't shown in correct aspect (width and height was swapped. Since 6.0)
• Debug information was printed to the system console window when making albums (Since 6.5)

6.5

Released: 2006-07-09

News and updates

• Jalbum now has an embedded web server allowing you to share albums straight from your hard disk without first publishing them
• When sharing albums, Jalbum can be minimized to the icon tray
• Jalbum can now optinally keep camera metadata (EXIF) inside generated image files
• The album engine itself now also accepts include filters (regular expressions)
• Does no longer default to use all available CPU cores as this requires more RAM and is known to cause problems with XBorderFilter (used in BluPlusPlus)
• Now correctly displays ISO settings for Canon PowerShot S3 IS
• Greek translation added. Thank you Chris Stefanidis!
• Thanks to translators for updating translations for this release!
• Chameleon skin updated to v3.04. Thank you Laza!
• BluPlusPlus skin updated to v3.10. Thank you Armond!

Bug fixes

• Jalbum could sometimes hang upon launch if a complex skin was set as default
• The ftp component was using passive mode no matter the setting of the passive mode switch (since 6.1)
• Some icons weren't displayed in their proper size (affecting skins with custom icons)
• Some thumbnails indicating folders weren't displayed in their proper size

6.4

Released: 2006-04-03

News and updates

• Jalbum now uses "THM" files (produced by Canon and Sony cameras for instance) to represent movie files instead of plain icons. ("THM" files are ordinary JPEG files with a "THM" extension)
• File extensions cannot accidently be changed when renaming files
• Chameleon skin updated to v2.92. Thank you Laza!

Bug fixes

• Editing comments in the new Edit section was a real memory eater causing Jalbum to slow down after browsing through a number of images (since v6.0). This part is now much more memory conservative

6.3.2

Released: 2006-03-10

Bug fixes

• GIF and PNG images didn't show up in the Edit tab (unless double clicked)
• Fix to ftp component (allow for missing end bracket re PASV response)

6.3

Released: 2006-03-03

News and updates

• Files on Edit tab can now be ordered by reverse name too
• Added option to, per default, exclude images recently added to the image directory
• To speed up the Edit tab when working with other image types than JPEG, GIF and PNG (TIFF for instance), Jalbum now tries to read thumbnails from other image types too
• New tint filter added. Color your images according to your taste
• The "XP" skin updated to v2.1, now with folder tree view and plugin support
• The "Slide show" skin can now play mp3 music in the background. Thank you Dhina and Johan
• Croatian translation updated. Thank you Roni.

Bug fixes

• The date and camera date ordering feature on the Edit tab didn't always get the ordering right
• The web host signup wizard sometimes failed with an ElementException. This was caused by the IO.readTextUrl method sometimes not reading the full contents of a URL
• The "Simple" skin didn't respect excluded directories
• The PhotoBox printing service didn't handle image file names containing spaces
• The <ja:fileiterator> element would trash global variables after its use (since v6.1)
• Danish translation improved. Thank you Carsten
• The JColorSelector component didn't respect the disabled mode
• The Experience, PBase and Family skins didn't properly specify the text encoding used

6.2

Released: 2006-01-30

News and updates

• You can now order prints straight from Jalbum albums using UK's best rated printing service, PhotoBox. They deliver within a couple of days over Europe
• New &aout;Server mode" Tool added that enables Jalbum to automtically make albums as soon as a change to the file system is detected. This allows Jalbum to run as a server and update albums as soon as new images are uploaded under the image directory.
• Jalbum now warns if unsaved changes has been made when quitting, loading projects or requesting new projects
• The Jalbum title bar now also tells the name of the current project
• Simplified use of the publish section by making Jalbum filter out leading and trailing spaces in connection properties and filter out "ftp://" from the server name field
• Several translations updated. Thank you all translators!
• Chameleon skin updated to v2.80. Thank you Laza!
• BluPlusPlus skin updated to v3.80. Thank you Armond!

Bug fixes

• Skin hints wasn't read on startup (old one)
• Jalbum didn't respect the style hint in the skin hints file (old one)
• Printing warning dialogs could pop up even if run in console mode
• The rootImageDirectory and rootAlbumDirectory variables weren't properly initialized when running Jalbum Tools from the command line
• Some images with damaged metadata structures could cause Jalbum to stop with this error: "Couldn't find Exif id in APP1 segment" (since 6.1.5). Now Jalbum ignores such errors
• The edit section wasn't properly handling files containing characters that didn't fit in the "System encoding", for instance Chinese characters on an English Windows machine

6.1.6

Released: 2005-12-30

News and updates

• Original images are now never copied if "Link to scaled images" linking option is selected
• The "Copy originals" checkbox is now shadowed properly when it is irrelevalt to use it.
• Portuguese translation updated
• FAQ updated

Bug fixes

• Write protected images couldn't be processed with the 6.1.5 release due to bug in new code to sense image orientation

6.1.5

Released: 2005-12-29

Bug fixes

• Using the smart upload feature on some ftp servers and countries triggered an "Unparseable date" error (since v6.1)
• Generated dead links between some slides if mixing directories and images in a directory (since v6.1)
• Images taken with the Konica Minolta Dynax 5D wasn't automatically oriented properly

6.1

Released: 2005-12-15

News and updates

• Makes use of multiple processors in order to enhance album generation speed. On a dual core system the speed gain is close to 100%. On CPUs with hyperthreading, the gain is up to 60%
• Jalbum can now automatically pick thumbnail images to represent folders instead of the folder icon being used as default
• The old FTP component has been replaced with the much improved edtFTPj component. This results in better, faster and more compatible FTP support that hopefully doesn't suffer from the timeout problems that affected the old FTP component (FtpBean)
• The progress reporting while uploading large files has been improved
• The jsch library for the SFTP support has been updated from v0.1.21 to v0.1.24
• All user interface text fields now have undo/redo capability and a popup menu with clipboard functionality (previously one had to use keyboard shortcuts)
• The JPEG quality field is now a slider as some people didn't get that right
• New iterator element for skin designers: ja:fileiterator acts like a ja:coliterator nested within a ja:rowiterator but with the addition of two optional attributes: "dirs" and "nodirs" which includes only directories or plain files
• Jalbum now ignores copying the dreadful hidden and write protected file "Thumbs.db" on Windows XP systems
• Chameleon skin updated. Thank you Laza
• Serbian and Croatian languages added. Thank you Filip Miletic
• Polish, Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Danish, Slovak, Czech and Chinese translations updated. Thank you all translators!

Bug fixes

• Fixed issue with slow uploads to certain ftp servers under Java 1.5. This is caused by a bug in Java 1.5 that causes unneccesary reverse DNS lookups to occur.
• If running out of memory while rendering thumbnail images for the Edit section, the thumbnail renderer would stop. Now it retries
• The "Experience" skin wouldn't generate correct text under index page thumbnails with Jalbum v6.0
• The "Simple" skin wouldn't generate pages if a directory only contained subdirectories
• Images with incorrect EXIF dates (00:00:00) would cause the edit section to fail (NullPointerException)
• Fixed old navigation button bug in Colorful skin (index page navigation buttons showing even if only one index page)
• Fixed small Danish translation error
• Fixed small issue with Experience skin (null pointer exception)

6.0

Released: 2005-11-02

News and updates

• A brand new image management section with a visual Explorer-like user interface. Stuff you can do now include:
• Use drag and drop to visually arrange images
• Arrange images in predefined ways per folder (camera date, file date, file name)
• Use rubberband selection and keyboard selection (control/shift) to select multiple images.
• Exclude images you don't want included in an album without deleting them from disk
• Permanently delete images
• Edit properties on images and folders
• Rename images and folders
• Run slide shows
• Set images to indicate album folders instead of using folder icons
• Rotate images safely and losslessly (only adjusts an image orientation flag)
• New stylish icons and appearance thanks to the Alloy look and feel from Incors!
• Supports several new file formats like TIFF, BMP and JPEG 2000 through the Java Advanced Imaging Image I/O Tools plugin from Sun
• Album folders can now be represented by a thumbnail image instead of the folder icon. Previously this was a feature of some skins, now this functionality is added to Jalbum itself
• Custom album titles and descriptions can now be set per album folder from the user interface
• Reads and writes progressive JPEG images
• Jalbum now auto senses the EXIF/TIFF image orientation info stored by cameras in JPEG images and rotates images accordingly. Note, only generated images are rotated, your originals are kept untouched. Jalbum is also smart enough to not further rotate already rotated images with incorrect image orientation info.
• The EXIF extraction library has been updated to v2.3, meaning a lot of fixes for common problems and support for more camera models. Thank you Drew! One notable improvement is support for reading Windows File Properties (title, subject, author, keywords and comment)
• sftp added. Thank you Joost den Boer for this integration
• Jalbum now recovers from errors caused by images that have corrupt EXIF structures (corrupt images may be ignored though)
• The user interface is now more responsive when presssing "Make album" / "Rebuild all"
• Tools can now be executed from the command line. Use the -runTool switch
• You can now upload albums from the command line. Use the -uploadAll or -smartUpload switches
• Jalbum now includes files found in a directory even if they are not present in an albumfiles.txt file, unless the filenames are prepended with a dash (-). This should remove the confusion caused when adding images to a directory and not seeing those presented in the updated album. This was previously the case if an albumfiles.txt file was present in the image directory. Note however that the albumfiles.txt file no longer needs to be edited manually. It is handled by Jalbum's new graphical album explorer interface.
• Updated installer (InstallAnywhere by Macrovision) from v6.1 to v7.1. This will hopefully solve problems installing Jalbum on some platforms.
• Bundled Chameleon skin (former DarkOSX) which comes in many stylish styles. Thank you Laza!
• Bundled skin BluPlusPlus updated to v3.7. Thank you Armond
• Bundled skin ExhibitPlus updated to v1.4a. Thank you Mark
• The ignore pattern is now case insensitive
• Turkish translation added. Thank you Bahad�r Yigit and Andreas Berger
• Croatian translation added. Thank you Ivo

Bug fixes

• Several skins used to check for existence of flash info in order to figure out if images contained EXIF information. This wasn't safe. Checks are now done on camera make instead
• Would throw a ClassCastException if encountering images with unexpected EXIF formatting (aperture value encoded as decimal string instead of rational number)
• The Experience skin would give a scripting error if encountering images with weird EXIF originalDate setting

5.2.2

Released: 2005-06-09

News and updates

• Spanish translation updated
• Simplified Chinese translation added. Thank you Ning Zhou
• Traditional Chinese translation added. Thank you Je Yi Hsu and Ning Zhou
• Bundled skin BluPlusPlus updated to v3.5
• Bundled skin XP updated to v1.28

Bug fixes

• Making albums including non-image files with image linking set to "Link to scaled images only" would not include the non-image files properly. Now non-image files are always copied to the output directory if image linking is set to "Link to scaled images only" (Long standing bug)

5.2

Released: 2005-04-02

News and updates

• Updates to large albums now significantly faster as Jalbum can skip subdirectories that haven't been touched since the last album build
• Memory handling improved: Variables not specific to an individual image are shared among images (previously copies were kept). The new memory handling is both a memory saver and a speed-up
• Skin template files are now processed faster due to rewritten way of expanding $variables. Expect between 30% and 100% speed increase depending on skin due to these two changes
• Skin developers that want to accelerate skins that rely heavily on scripting may compile the scripts into Java classes. In order to minimize changes to the existing code, one may subclass the new CompiledScript convenience class that provides direct access to most of the neccesary Jalbum variables
• Skin specific user interface controls are no longer synchronized with user defined variables in order not to bloat the user variable list with settings that can as well be set in the skin specific user interface. Skin writers: You may now prefix skin hints that apply to your UI controls with "skin." instead of "user." in order not to bloat the user variables list
• New "JSP 2.0 style" syntax for inserting simple expressions. Expressions like <%= meta.get("Flash") %> can now be written as ${meta.Flash}. In the future, this syntax may also be accelerated further compared to standard scriptlet syntax
• Comments that are not to show in generated code can now be written using <%-- jsp comment syntax --%>
• Improved error reporting for scripting errors. A full stack trace is now presented if errors occur in Java code called from scripts
• Made date interpretation more robust: The variables fileDate and originalDate are no longer String types but FormattedDate types. This will require a slight modification to skins that assume the String type like older BluPlusPlus skins
• Scripts may now call window.ui2Engine() to synchronize the Jalbum engine with the user interface
• Korean translation added. Thank you Jae Sung Jung
• Norwegian translation added. Thank you Stein Kristiansen
• Ukrainian translation added. Thank you Serhij Dubyk
• Updated French, Polish, German, Hungarian and Slovak translations. Thank you translators!
• Made Jalbum recognize "mp4" files as media files too
• Again recognizes EXIF 2.2 tags (Thanks to Klaus A. Brunner, Austria)
• Updated UI synchronization classes (BeanBinder and PropertyBinder) to properly synchronize user interfaces that are implemented using class hierarchies
• Added the "not" attribute as a convenience to the ja:if tag
• Added missing progress info text for index page processing (used to just read "Processing image metadata")
• Searches skin specific texts in the "texts" directory of a skin prior to searching in the root skin directory (was previously the other way around)
• Added a "currentFile" variable to indicate the currently processed file. (Gives more clear code than writing files[imageNum-1] )
• Bundled the popular "Simple" skin.
• Updated bundled skin BluPlusPlus to v3.1. There are too many enhancements to list here. Just have a peek at the BluPlusPlus frame gallery and you'll see one of them
• Updated bundled skin ExhibitPlus. to v1.4. A lot of enhancements here too
• Defaults to using Firefox as browser on Linux instead of Netscape

Bug fixes

• EXIF comments encoded in Unicode sometimes lost their last character
• The skin specific plugins folder wasn't taken into account when executing the onload.bsh script
• Code loaded from plugins directories would only find local classes and classes loaded by the system class loader. This would cause trouble running Jalbum in environments with custom class loaders (like web servers for instance)
• Didn't recognize .jpe as a valid JPEG file extension.
• The getModifiedSize() method of image filters that implement the ModifiesSize interface wasn't passed the full range of context variables (as compared to the filter() method
• The sharpen and blur filters could produce borders around images
• Calling processTemplateFile(source, dest) from init.bsh wouldn't expand the currently defined variables
• Skin specific fields weren't saved to a project if they were disabled.
• Relative paths to original files weren't constructed correctly if the image directory path started like the output path without being a subdirectory thereof. (For instence the image directory being "C:\album original" and the output directory being "C:\album")
• Loading a project containing skin specific drop list settings that no longer exist in a drop list could cause NullPointerException
• Jalbum didn't respect custom drop list settings to be loaded from a project (say for instance a thumbnail size of "88x88")
• The totalImages variable wasn't available on index pages
• The Family skin sometimes created broken links between folders
• The Experience skin sometimes had problems interpreting dates
• The PropertyBinder class could go in an infinite loop if passed certain component structures.
• PropertyBinder.syncUI() didn't recursively process fields of type JComponentHolder (for instance ControlPanel)

5.1

Released: 2004-11-06

News and updates

• Skins may now have their own "plugins" folder for really skin-specific plugins (searched before the main plugins folder)
• Japanese translation added. Thank you Masaki Katakai and Furusawa Hideaki
• Updated Danish, German, Spanish, Czech and Thai translations. Thank you helpful translators!
• Added a sharpening and blurring filter to the list of image filters.
• Image filters that modifies the image size can now signal this by implementing the se.datadosen.Jalbum.ModifiesSize interface. Jalbum can then correctly calculate values for the ---Width and ---Height variables. The bundled FixedShapeFilter and XBorderFilter have been updated to implement this interface. The bundled Wedding skin now demonstrates the new simplicity this new scheme has brought to skins.
• Updated bundled skin BluPlusPlus to v2.9. Thanks Armond and co.
• Added two new tutorials to the tutorials section: "Publish an album" and "Integrate an album into an existing web site"

Bug fixes

• Didn't handle Unicode encoded EXIF comments
• The signup wizard couldn't set the "Web directory" setting
• The FileFilters.hasIcon() API method didn't return true for directories
• International texts added to skins with the $text.xxx system didn't default to the default language if a translation was missing for a particular text string

5.0.4

Released: 2004-10-17

News and updates

• Added tool to the Tools menu to calculate the size of the final album (Useful before publishing albums)
• Updated bundled skin "XP" to v1.22. Thank you Anders!
• Removed skin hints that causes confusion from bundled BluPlusPlus skin

Bug fixes

• Sometimes generated a scripting error when launched from a project file
• Sometimes generated a scripting error on startup and skin loading (missing "Item" class)
• Old skins using the "gifs" directory to hold skin resources caused a NullPointerException error.
• Inspecting the meta object with the <%= meta %> expression was broken.

5.0.2

Released: 2004-10-11

Bug fixes

• Jalbum forgot to respect the web directory setting when creating directories on the remote server.

5.0.1

Released: 2004-10-11

News and updates

• Jalbum 5.0 produced icon links for files of text type. This is not suitable for those that uses external text files to store image comments. Recognition of text files has therefore been turned off again. It can however easily be reactivated by editing the "filetypes.xml" file.

Bug fixes

• The plugins were accidently compiled with Java 1.5 and were therefore not accepted on older versions

5.0

Released: 2004-10-10

News and updates

• Publishing images is now simplified with a new wizard for simple web host signup and setting of ftp settings. Web hosting providers: Read how to integrate with Jalbum.
• Multiple FTP settings can now be easily managed with a new "FTP account profile" section.
• Arbitrary non-displayable file types are now supported with icon links. (Previously only a few hardcoded media file types were supported with icons.) Jalbum can now be used as a more general publishing tool than before. Edit the filetypes.xml file to add support for new file types.
• Skins may now completely control the image ordering by installing a custom image orderer class (implementing the Comparator interface). This is done by calling engine.setCustomImageOrdering(). See the API docs for more info.
• Automatically checks for updates on start up. (This doesn't slow down start up and the update itself isn't automatic. The feature can be disabled in the Advanced section)
• Jalbum now delivers more image metadata on request instead of accumulating all metadata for each image. Jalbum should therefore be at least four times more memory conserative for large albums now.
• Bulgarian translation added thanks to Andrey Jivkov
• Spanish traslation updated. Thanks Roberto!
• Updated the bundled XBorderFilter to v0.95 This image filter has an impressive range of capabilities: It can add various borders to images, crop them to various shapes, add shadow effects etc.
• Added a RotationFilter that can rotate images a specified angle.
• Image filters can now be given custom settings per image per image instead of per album. (Done by wrapping them in the PropertySettingFilterWrapper class)
• The ftp uploader now ignores uploading Jalbum project files (security reason as these files may contain ftp passwords)
• Jalbum now includes a Tool to clear all user defined variables
• Bundled new cool skins like "Wedding" and "Family" that show off what can be done with the flexible XBorderFilter and RotationFilter. See samples section.
• Again uses Java 1.4 (if available) on Mac OS X as Apple has released a fix for the preiously broken drag and drop support in Java 1.4 for OS X
• Updated installer (InstallAnywhere by ZeroG) from v5.5 to v6.1. This will hopefully solve the problems installing Jalbum on some platforms.
• Added integration with Mypix.se online printing service to the bundled skins. Mypix.se distributes images within Europe faster and to a lower cost than the US-based Shutterfly equivalent. Future integrations are now also possible without the need to adjust existing skins.
• Updated bundled skin "BluPlusPlus" to v2.8 rc2. Thank you PhotoGuy!
• Updated bundled skin "XP" to v1.21. Thank you Anders!

Bug fixes

• The ftp uploader didn't check if the server supported UTF-8 encoding or not. Will now fall back to ISO-8859-1 encoding if UTF-8 encoding is not supported by the server.
• The ftp uploader ignored files beginning with a dot or underscore when it should have respected the ignore pattern set in the advanced section instead.
• IPTC comments containing just white space (spaces, tabs etc) would take precedence over EXIF comments. Now a comment needs to contain visible text to take precedence over another comment.
• The IO.relativePath method returned "" (the empty string) instead of "." in order to indicate a path to the current directory. This made it risky to construct paths using IO.relativePath as a component when referring to the current directory as such references easily became root references (/ instead of ./)
• Images containing incomplete EXIF information could generate a division by zero error.
• The skinResDirectory variable couldn't be referenced from init.bsh on the first album generation

4.6

Released: 2004-07-11

News and updates

• Thumbnails are now smoothly scaled without any noticable speed loss (this option can be deselected). This is done by first scaling down thumbnails quickly to twice the size, and then doing the final scaling smoothly.
• The user may now control where Jalbum searches for image comments (in any of five locations)

Bug fixes

• Jalbum incorrectly assumed the directory for a list of images presented on an index page to be the directory of the first image in the list. This is usually true (all images on an index page belonging to the same directory), but not if images are gathered from different locations on a hard disk by the use of an "albumfiles.txt" file. Now the "imageDirectory" is where the Jalbumfiles.txt file is located.

4.5

Released: 2004-07-04

News and updates

• Skin processing is now over 100% faster for advanced skins that make heavy use of scripting (like BluPlusPlus). The speed is gained by not evaluating common code more than once. See the new "once" attribute for the ja:include tag and the new definition scriptlet type (<%! ... %>).
• Jalbum now keep one script interpreter throughout the album generation process.
• The previously hardcoded names for thumbnail and slide directories "thumbs" and "slides" are about to be user configurable. Future versions of Jalbum will also allow prefixes to be set for generated thumbnails and closeup images. Skin developers: Please replace hardcoded paths with calls to engine.getThumbnailDirectory(), engine.getCloseupDirectory(), engine.getSlideDirectory(), engine.getThumbnailPrefix() and engine.getCloseupPrefix() so that your skins won't brake if users change these settings. In this version, these properties are still read-only. Skins that only use the $XXXPath variables (applies to most skins) need not be modified.
• The Jalbum window now has a new "Preferences" tab for environmental settings (program behaviour that doesn't affect the generated album). These settings can be saved as defaults. These are the available options:
• The preferred language
• Look And Feel
• Debug mode (moved from Advanced tab)
• If to automatically write comments to images
• If skins are to be allowed to alter Jalbum settings (moved from Main tab)
• If to show warning dialogs
• If to allow hints to blink (What a feature! ;-) )
• The advanced tab is now broken down into three sections (main, naming, user variables) to better accomodate new features
• Jalbum now accepts regular expressions to filter out files and directories that should be excluded during album generation. This replaces the previous comma separated list of directories to ignore.
• Skins containing multiple languages may now stuff language files inside a "texts" directory (gives a cleaner file structure than leaving these files in the root of a skin directory)
• Czech translation added. Thank you Pavel. Any Chinese translators out there that wish to help?
• Russian translation added. Thank you Lev and Julian.
• The Horizontal and Vertical skins now also shows the first image on startup instead of a blank page.
• Added a tool that converts filenames to lower case in order to ease publishing to some UNIX servers that convert case
• Bundled skin "BluPlusPlus" updated to v2.5 (No more dependent on Java 1.4)
• Bundled skin "XP" updated to v1.19
• Bundled skin "ExhibitPlus" updated to v1.3
• Bundled the very flexible XBorderFilter image filter by Jens Troeger that allows skins to put a rich variety of frames around images (actually stored within each image)
• The progress dialog time estimate is now more accurate
• The System console window now properly scrolls down as text is being written to it
• Jalbum now also recognizes the "Image Description" EXIF tag written by PS Album as an image comment.

Bug fixes

• Jalbum would not update generated pages if only a change to the character encoding was made
• The Colorful skin would sometimes draw a broken border around thumbnails on index page (Thanks Bill)
• Shutterfly image printing wouldn't work with image linking set to "Link to originals" (Thanks Mark)
• The Exhibit skin contained a broken link to a support graphic element
• The "XP" skin didn't include the meta charset tag
• Drag and drop is again working on Mac OS X. This as Jalbum again uses Java 1.3 for OS X instead of Java 1.4 which has a bug in the drag and drop support. Note Apple has a fix available on Apple Developer Connection too, should you prefer to run Jalbum on top of Java 1.4 for OS X instead

4.4

Released: 2004-04-03

News and updates

• Jalbum may now be run from other directories than its installation directory. This simplifies embedding Jalbum in other applications.
• New command line switch -programDirectory that specifies where to look for Jalbum support directories (if not found in either the current directory or relative to the Jalbum.jar file).
• New command line switch -skinsDirectory that specifies where to look for Jalbum skins.
• Skin user interfaces may now register to listen for "JalbumEvents" to simplify synchronisation and life cycle management (see API docs for se.datadosen.Jalbum.event and the top of the onload.bsh file for the "XP" skin)
• Interactive console window added to simplify debugging skins. The console window captures anything written to System.out and also allows the developer to evaluate BeanShell expressions interactively.
• Results from ftp connection test will appear in a pop up dialogue.
• If a remote directory is missing when pressing "Upload all" or "Smart upload", Jalbum will ask if the directory is to be created. Previously this check was only done when pressing "Test connection"
• "XP" skin updated to better handle browsing on Safari (Mac)

4.3

Released: 2004-03-26

News and updates

• Startup time reduced. Jalbum now loads about twice as fast on fast computers.
• Skin styles may now have their own resources directory and preview image. I have modified the bundled "XP" skin to make use of these features. I encourage skin developers to follow this example.
• Maps common IPTC metadata tags (as set by Adobe Photoshop for example) to variables (author, keywords, comment etc).
• Thai language added. Thank you Weerasak Witthawaskul.
• Estonian language added. Thank you Kristian S�gi.
• New skin "Minimal" added. Use this one as template when creating your own skins!
• Bundled skin "BluPlusPlus" updated to v2.3
• Watermarking in "BluPlusPlus" removed as it caused annoyance.
• Bundled skin "XP" updated to v1.14
• Bundled skin "PBase" updated to v2.0
• Stips leading and trailing spaces from ftp publish properties in order to minimise user errors.
• Ignores files starting with _ or . when uploading. (Some ftp servers cannot handle files beginning with a dot.)
• New simpler URL to Jalbum - Jalbum.net and a new variable ($generatorUrl) that points to it for skin developers to use.

Bug fixes

• Uploading files to some ftp servers resulted in a "OPTS UTF-8 not understood" error.
• "XP" skin didn't work with Java 1.3
• Opening web pages from within Jalbum didn't work on some machines.
• Skins missing a texts.properties file would generate a stack trace printout.

4.2.1

Released: 2004-01-08

Bug fixes

• The integrated ftp component (3:rd party code) didn't handle pathnames with non-ASCII characters (����� etc). Now uses UTF-8 encoding meaning full Unicode support.
• The integrated ftp component sometimes generated NullPointerException errors. This has hopefully been taken care of.

4.2

Released: 2004-01-05

News and updates

• On Windows: Registers files of type .jap (Jalbum Project file) with Jalbum. Jalbum can now be launched with projects loaded by clicking these files.
• Removed skin hints that could cause annoyance with users, like toggling scaling quality, JPEG quality percent or "Copy originals"
• Italian language added to the XP skin. Thank you Alian Schiavoncini.
• Simplified integration into other Java applications by allowing host applications to disable exit when closing Jalbum window.

4.1.4

Released: 2003-12-27

News and updates

• Added 18 image transition effects to the Slide Show skin (works with IE5.5 and up)

Bug fixes

• Running Jalbum from the command line with the -help option would fail (v4.1.3)
• The page attribute for the ja:include tag ignored scriptlets when searching for include pages in the skin directory and common includes directory (v4.1.3)
• The RiverLayout layout engine used to build skin user interfaces didn't handle more than two left-aligned columns of components (didn't handle multiple tab stops in one row)

4.1.3

Released: 2003-12-17

News and updates

• Jalbum skins may now have custom graphical user interfaces! See the "ShowOff skin and skin creation section. Now all the features previously only available for advanced users can be exposed to ordinary users.
• New highly flexible skin "ShowOff" added that also has a graphical user interface which allows custom color selection, custom titles, copyright messages, descriptions, watermarking, font sizes and other goodies to be set.
• Several skins updated to have custom user interfaces and more features, most notably ExhibitPlus 1.2 and BluPlusPlus 2.1
• Integration to Shutterfly image printing service added to several skins. Now your friends can order prints easily as they view your albums.
• Added tool to reset file dates to camera dates for all images under the image directory
• Added tool to automatically rotate images under the image directory by using the camera EXIF rotation info
• The ja:include tag will now also search in the current skin directory and then in the new common "includes" directory after code snippets. This simplifies code sharing for skin developers a great deal.
• The ja:rowiterator element now accepts multiple ja:coliterator elements. This simplifies creation of more advanced skins.
• Slovak and Polish languages added. Thank you translators!
• Dropped generation of Jalbum generator meta tag due to html/xml compatibility issues.

Bug fixes

• External links to web pages not ending in a directory from Jalbum itself wouldn't work
• Slovak and Polish languages added. Thank you translators!
• Some other minor bug fixes
• Some images could cause the meta object to not appear even though EXIF data did exist
• With the $label variable, directory names containing a dot were truncated

4.0.4

Released: 2003-11-24

News and updates

• Updated Italian and Portuguese language files
• Updated BluPlusPlus skin to v1.11

Bug fixes

• Would ignore existing album directories not containing original images when updating "master indexes".
• MetadataExtractor updated to v2.2.2. Will fix ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsExpeption occuring for some images. Thanks Drew!

4.0.3

Released: 2003-11-07

News and updates

• Added Finnish language support. Thank you Markku!

Bug fixes

• Would break on file names ending in non ASCII characters if URL encode links was turned on

4.0.2 (language update only)

Released: 2003-11-06

News and updates

• Added new languages: Italian and Spanish. Thank you translators! Jalbum now talks all major European languages.

4.0.2

Released: 2003-11-04

News and updates

• Added new languages: Dutch, Danish, French and Portuguese. Thank you translators!
• Added new 3:rd party skin: ExhibitPlus. Thank you Mark Fyvie!

Bug fixes

• Didn't ignore the gifs directory when traversing directories after album images (since v4.0.1)

4.0.1

Released: 2003-10-31

News and updates

• User may now specify a list of directory names to ignore during processing. Handy for those who make albums out of directory structures generated by digital cameras.
• Added new listFiles() method to the AlbumBean engine to simplify creation of advanced skins, etc. See API doc for more info

4.0

Released: 2003-10-31

News and updates

• The Jalbum user interface is now multilingual. Current languages are: English, Swedish, German and Hungarian. More translations to follow if you helpful people out there can spare a couple of hours (check out the "texts" directory)
• Fully dynamic, rewritten, resizable user interface in order to support different languages. Jalbum occupies less desk space now, but can be enlarged if needed.
• Popular 3:rd party skins are now bundled: BluPlusPlus, XP, PBase and Experience. Thank you skin authors!
• Comes with a new multilingual installer.
• Jalbum now has a new tools menu where users can plug in their own extension scripts to do general tasks (like resetting file date to camera date, batch-rotating images etc)
• Added drop boxes for common image and thumbnail sizes.
• Reads and writes comments to external text files in order to speed up the process of adding comments (writing directly to the images is time consuming but still supported).
• Loading a skin with "skin hints" will clear old filter settings. (No more confusion on why getting black and white images...)
• Added option to control if directories are to be ordered before image files
• Replaced the annoying "load skin hints" warning with a checkbox.
• Added keyboard PageUp and PageDown shortcuts to easily move between images while adding comments.
• Improved scripting error reporting.
• Again uses BeanShell2.0 as scripting engine.
• Updated EXIF parsing engine (MetadataExtractor v2.2) meaning better camera data support.
• Defaults to not write UTF-8 as, for example Internet Explorer ignores the "charset" meta attribute when doing local browsing thereby missinterpreting foreign characters.
• Does not write the "UTF-8 signature bytes" anymore (browser compatibility issue). These bytes indicate UTF-8 files according to W3C, but is a too modern standard for many browsers (Mozilla for example) The effect was that three weird looking characters showed up in the beginning of a page.
• Automatically senses UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoded text files (with or without the help of the W3C signature bytes).
• Will not attempt to write to write protected files. (Previously this caused hard-to-understand errors with the write protected hidden "Thumbs.db" file that Windows XP generates)
• The list of skins is always ordered alphabetically now. Only skin directories are listed (i.e. plain files are not listed)
• The list of user defined variables is always ordered alphabetically now.
• The list of styles is filtered to only show .css type files
• Added new "Dates" utility class for skin developers. Please see javadoc for more info.
• Scripts may now abort album generation by throwing a se.datadosen.Jalbum.OperationAbortedException
• Better compliance with xhtml when outputting data.

Bug fixes

• Scroll bars didn't appear on the "Slide show" thumbnail page , even if needed.
• Background image didn't show up on skins having background images like "Polaroid" and "Film" (error in skins)
• Bug fix for Mac OS X 10.2: Clicking view album and edit skin didn't work. Now works, but untested for OS X 10.0 and 10.1
• Bug fix for Mac OS X: UI controls would collide

3.6.1

Released: 2003-09-11

Bug fixes

• v1.3 of BeanShell scripting caused trouble with Jalbum image filters (problem with getClass() command) I have reverted to v1.2 until this is fixed.

3.6

Released: 2003-09-09

News and updates

• Fully supports foreign and multibyte character sets (Russian, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean etc).
• BeanShell scripting is updated to v1.3 with a host of new features.
• Scripting errors should now be easier to interpret and less lengthy.
• Jalbum can now check for updates (see help menu).
• Multilingual skins can be made by using the new $text.key syntax.
• Image ordering has been extended to allow "simple" name ordering in addition to the trying-to-be-smart name ordering that orders the numerical part numerically.
• New variables to simplify scripting: rootImageDirectory, rootOutputDirectory, rootPath and textEncoding.
• The IO.copyDirectoryContent method now also copies subdirectories.
• The generated albumfiles.txt file (for custom image ordering) now uses DOS/Windows line ending (simplifies editing in Windows).
• The AlbumBean.ProcessTemplateFile method is no longer static (respects text encoding set in AlbumBean)
• Standard skins updated to specify text encoding as a meta tag

Bug fixes

• Writing comments to some JPEG images didn't work. Thanks Dmitriy.
• Changes to user defined variables wouldn't register correctly unless ENTER was pressed.
• Image ordering wasn't correctly set when loading projects under Java 1.4 (v3.5)
• The IO.relativePath method didn't correctly handle some situations.
• The files listed in the edit panel was not limited to those in albumfiles.txt (if such exists)
• The IO.urlEncode method didn't encode #.
• Mac OS X version: Would use MacRoman text encoding instead of ISO-8859-1 which caused problem with characters in the 128-255 range like � � �

3.5

Released: 2003-07-31

News and updates

• Allows custom image- and directory ordering.
• Will skip directies not containing valid images or media files (unless they contain directories that contain images or media files etc)
• If an output directory (or directories) does not exist, it will be created.
• Image filters can now be applied before scaling is performed with the new "prescale" filter attribute (this change was applied to init.bsh).
• Added a zoom filter that especially makes small thumbnails more interpretable.
• Added a "Fixed shape filter". Crops images if needed so they exactly fit the dimensions set for "thumbnail size" or "max image size" in the user interface. This makes all images and/or thumbnails the same shape (portrait, squary etc).
• Accepts the -Dswing.defaultlaf command line option to select a custom look and feel.
• Allows zero or several rowiterator - coliterator pairs for index pages.
• The <ja:if exists="variable"> construct have been improved to also make sure that string variables are non empty. To do a classic existence test (not checking for null or empty content) do a <ja:if test="<%variable != void%>">
• The IO.copyFile API method now also copies directories.

3.4

Released: 2003-06-03

News and updates

• Skins can now be previewed. Click the preview button and Jalbum will show a sample image for the selected skin. You can leave the preview window open to always show a preview of the current skin.
• Skins now accept the new "res" (resources) directory which replaces the "gifs" directory. The "res" directory is not duplicated if an album contains subdirectories/subfolders. (With the "gifs" directory, this was the case). The stylesheet file isn't duplicated either if the "res" directory is used in a skin, it is also put inside the "res" directory. There are two new variables to support this new scheme: $resPath and $stylePath which always points to the res directory and the style file respectively nomatter how deep an album structure is.
• All standard skins rewritten to make use of the new, smarter "res" directory feature and variables.
• Empty thumbs and slides directories will be removed from albums containing just subfolders and no images.

3.3.2

Released: 2003-05-30

Bug fixes

• v3.3 Didn't start from command line
• v3.3 wasn't especially memory conservative

3.3

Released: 2003-05-12

News and updates

• Pluggable image filters added. JAlbum is now capable of automatically adding watermarks, logos and texts to images, grayscale them etc. A couple of ready-made filters are provided that can be combined in any possible way by JAlbum skins. You can also easily write your own image filters with some basic Java skills. Try the embedded "GrayFilm" skin for a demonstration, it is a copy of the Film skin, but makes all images grayscale and adds the filedate to each image.
• Added FTP port number to Publish tab.
• Will warn users that selecting new image/thumbnail sizes without rebuilding the album may lead to poor image quality
• If an image comment is recognized as actually being a copyright message from an image manipulation software, it is not displayed in the generated album.
• Added support for Russian date format (dd.MM.yy HH:mm)
• Practical variable "level" added to assist in skin creation
• Added list of Java system properties to About JAlbum dialogue.
• On album generation, will execute any BeanShell script found "init.bsh" files in the JAlbum program directory or skin directories.
• Although not a movie or image format, will also recognize mp3 files and add icons for them

Bug fixes

• Installer updated with about 28 fixes for different target platforms.
• Saving projects in image directory or album didn't update the "current project" setting so a subsequent save (ctrl+S) operation didn't always save to the right project file.
• Used to create an empty meta object even if no metadata was found, so the check <ja:if exists="meta">... in skins would always evaluate to true. This resulted in $variables representing camera settings showing unexpanded for images without metadata even if correctly enclosed in such an if block.

3.2

Released: 2003-02-11

News and updates

• Page generation speed improved up to 400%. This doesn't affect much for first time album generation as image scaling consumes most of the time, but updates to existing albums is significantly faster.
• Pages that hasn't changed when generating albums are left untouched on disc. This enables quick updates of web albums by utilizing FTP clients with directory synchronization ability.
• Will not automatically write empty comments to images (safety precaution)
• Changed the "Save project to album directory" menu to do just that instead of saving the project to the image directory. Added a new menu option to save the project to the image directory instead.
• Recognizes .ram, .rm and .asf file types as movie files too.
• Handles parsing of US EXIF date/time format too.
• Several skins modified to work better when viewed from Netscape 4.7

Bug fixes

• Script code put between a ja:rowiterator and ja:coliterator element wasn't executed properly

3.1

Released: 2003-01-28

News and updates

• Script errors are now being explained better. This should simplify a lot for those who develop scripts
• Adding a dot (.) or underscore (_) in front of either a file or directory will make JAlbum ignore it
• Image folders are always ordered alphabetically (a-z) and placed before images no matter the image ordering setting. (User request)
• If output directory is specified as a relative path, it is now relative to the image directory instead of the program directory. (User request). Set it to "album" and save as default, your albums will now always be generated in an "album" subdirectory of the image directory you specify
• New variable $totalAlbumImages that gives the total number of images (and media files) in the image directory and all subdirectories
• Edited comments are automatically saved to the image when navigating between images so one doesn't accidently lose an edit by forgetting to press "Write comment"
• The full path of the image being edited in the Edit page is now displayed
• JAlbum also recognizes .qt file format as a movie format

Bug fixes

• The irritating behaviour of the directory chooser not always accepting a directory choice now supressed. (Java1.3 bug)
• Following an "Up" link from a subalbum that uses frames (like "Vertical" and "Horizontal" and then clicking on an image would make the closeup image pop up in a window of its own.
• Some file name combinations (containing certain numbers) would cause a nullpointer exception when ordering images by name
• Comments written by Exifer could show up like the string "ASCII"
• In the Edit tab, if an image file name had more than one dot, the image name would be cut before the first instead of the last dot
• In the Edit tab, didn't include subdirectories when pressing "Get images from Album"