Jalbum 8.2 released

Today we have released Jalbum 8.2. With each release we have two main goals:

• Simplify the workflow for newcomers
• Empower advanced users

At a glance, these dual goals might seem contradicting, but we firmly believe this is the balance we need to strike in order to satisfy the many existing users and at the same time attract users with less computing skills. The changes made to Jalbum 8.2 are in line with this philosophy.

Workflow improvements

We have made several simplifications to the work flow, from the welcome sign in panel to publishing your first album. We've introduced a collapsible user interface panel where we can hide more advanced settings and redesigned the main settings panel to better reflect the basic album settings most users would want to set.

Power to professionals

Camera enthusiasts and professionals will appreciate the improvements we've made to handling camera metadata. In Jalbum's Edit view, Jalbum now displays a "Camera" panel that extracts relevant camera EXIF information like F number, exposure time and focal length. Jalbum even calculates the 35mm focal length equivalent for you.

Power to developers

Skin developers, check out the improved "Skin developer" menu under the Tools menu! You will enjoy a powerful integrated text editor that does syntax coloring and is aware of the variables that can be used by a skin. It also has internal documentation for all Jalbum variables. Apart from improvements to this editor, we've added new functions to the "Skin developer" menu to create new skins and delete skins.

The new camera info panel and integrated text editor are two examples of Plugins using Jalbum's new Plugin API. This API allows developers to add new components to Jalbum's Tools menu, its context menu and edit panel. Skin developers may also use this API to add custom UIs to the edit panel. A custom edit panel may for instance contain fields not yet available in Jalbum's main UI, like fields for category and location for instance, or why not have UI controls for customizing the layout on an image-by-image basis? It will be exciting to see what the skin developer community comes up with! I will soon release a demo skin in the skin repository that shows how a skin can use this new API to produce a custom edit panel.

Jalbum's integrated text editor and camera info plugin have been released as open source under the liberal Apache license. You can access the source code in the links above. If you make improvements to these plugins or make new plugins, please post them in Jalbum's developer forum.

Enjoy!