After a rather long break we finally have jAlbum 12.2 out. Id like to share some of the highlights with you. As always youll find the full list of enhancements in our release notes.
New full screen slide show
jAlbum has a rewritten full screen slide show that simplifies the process of approving images. The slide show mode is not just convenient for local album presentation, its foremost intended to help you approve and reject images. The previous slide show allowed you to rate and flag images using your keyboard, but that was rather hidden. We now display UI controls for rating, flagging, excluding and deleting unwanted images. To hide these controls, just move the mouse to a side of the screen. The new slide show also simplifies navigation by providing first/last buttons and displaying the current position.
Zoom support
You can now zoom into your images using jAlbums edit panel to further assist you in your image approval process. Either use the mouse wheel or the zoom slider to zoom in and out. You can toggle max/min zoom by double clicking the image. Use the zoom control panel in the lower right of the image to pan or simply drag the mouse inside a zoomed image. To hide the zoom control panel, simply move the mouse out of the image area.
Sub directory chaining
jAlbum is a great tool to present loads of images organized in hierarchical folder structures. While this is great for keeping things organized, you may still want to allow your visitors to navigate the album in a sequential manner.
This means that clicking the “next” button of the last image in folder A will take you to the first image in folder “B” etc. To enable this feature, select “Chain directories” under “Advanced” album settings. Heres an example of the same album presented without and with chained directories so you can compare.
Note: It is currently not recommended to use directory chaining on an album where a folder contains a mix of images and folders. You will end up with a confusing navigation.
Improved TIFF reading |
Now running on Java 8 |
Experimental JavaScript support |
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Upon reports that some TIFF images werent rendered correctly (showed up as grey snow), weve switched the preferred library for TIFF reading from Apache Sanselan to Suns (now Oracle) Advanced Imaging Tools. Please report to us if you encounter any problems reading TIFF images that you didnt have previously. To switch back to the Apache Sanselan library, simply delete the file jai_imageio-1.1.jar from jAlbums lib folder. To locate jAlbums lib folder, select Tools → Open directories → Program directory. |
jAlbum 12.2 is approved for Java 8, the latest version of Oracles awesome cross platform software environment. The Windows version now runs on a bundled Oracle Java 8 instead of Java 7 and is therefore more performant than ever. This bundled Java engine is local to jAlbum only and therefore does not present any potential security risk. The security problems reported in the past have mostly been related to integrating Java in the browser. |
jAlbum skin developers have so far been required to master a rather rich set of skills, which has narrowed the potential developer base. On top of the must have skills for web developers, which are HTML, CSS and JavaScript, they have also needed to understand Java or BeanShell (scripted Java) to create the user interface for skin settings and for some skin logic. We will soon allow skin developers to use ordinary JavaScript for these tasks too. jAlbum 12.2 currently allows you to play with this brand new and super fast Nashorn JavaScript engine inside jAlbums system console window. Weve measured speed gains up to 6000 times (!) The future will tell how much this turbo charged scripting engine will impact album generation time… |
Your comments on this are welcome!
Regards,
/David
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