Jalbum 8.3 “Turbo” loaded with improvements

This release looks pretty much the same on the outside, but don't let the surface fool you. Jalbum 8.3 is packed with improvements under the hood. For instance, twice the speed on smooth image scaling, and a significantly faster and tighter album publishing. We've also made it easier to import settings from previous album projects so you can make a new album with the same settings as another album in a snap. Jalbum 8.3 can now print your images to your own printer. It also has a new “Instant preview” function that lets you generate a rough preview of your album using the selected skin and style settings in a split second! Play with it by browsing through skins and styles, then press F3! For a full list of changes, see the release notes.

Candy for skin developers

Skin developers will enjoy the new “Pack as .jaskin” function to quickly zip their skins for distribution.

New storage for your albums

We've seen a fantastic growth of new Jalbum users lately, which is exciting. The massive number of accounts was starting to take its toll on the old hosting server so we initiated a server move to new hosting servers a couple of months back. Now we're running on new physical servers, disks and software. The servers are located 30 meters under ground in a re-built bomb-shelter in Stockholm, originally designed to withstand a close nuclear bomb hit. Check out the album, it's a cool place!

Lean, mean, publishing machine

The new servers make Jalbum accounts better in many regards:

• Publishing albums is significantly faster thanks to “zipstreaming” — your albums are compressed into one zip file during publishing and decompressed automatically on the server side. Our forum admins have published typical albums from the U.K, U.S, Australia and Hungary and measure around 3 times faster publishing!
• Albums can be deleted from the server in a fraction of a second.

I want to extend a thank you to Ben Spink who has written CrushFTP — the server used for publishing and developed these new features that are specific to our needs. I also want to thank our forum admins for helping us testing this new service. Now we eagerly await feedback from you!