Skin news – 2023 summer

Every year we add more and more functionality and features to our skins. 2023 isn’t different in this regard. You might have noticed that a handful of our bundled skins recently received major updates. It started with a Samples page redesign – which hasn’t been deployed yet – so you can enjoy these enhancements even before we exhibit them. Let’s see what are the news:

Simpler styles

Over the past two decades, the landscape of web design has undergone a remarkable transformation. While the early 2000s were characterized by skeuomorphic designs, where websites mimicked real-world textures and objects, with the advent of mobile devices, minimalism, and plain design emerged. The focus shifted towards usability, enhancing user engagement and accessibility. Our default skin – Tiger – still carries this skeuomorphic heritage that started with Chameleon and later Turtle. Even though you could make Tiger look simpler before version 4 too, now I added a few simple styles – Latte, Portfolio, Plain Light, and Plain Dark – to make authoring simplistic web galleries even easier.

Check out all the styles of the Photoblogger skin and the Story skin too!

The hero image, or theme image, now can be covered by a semi-transparent color layer, or a pattern, and can be made black and white. And naturally, you can even hide the image altogether for an even simpler look.

Fancy creating new styles?

I have developed a small tool that creates a new style from the current settings. If you’d like to play with it, download this tool, tweak every setting to your liking, and save it as a new style with Tools / External tools / Create new style from the current settings. You can specify which settings to include and exclude, but in most cases, you don’t need to modify this – just give it a name, and press OK. You might need to reload the skin (Ctrl-R) for the new style to appear in the “Styles” box.

If you think your new style would appeal to other users, please send us the style files; stylename.css and stylename.jap from the Skin directory (Ctrl-Shift-S) / styles subfolder. You can send your design for any of our bundled skins, and we will exhibit the best ones, and perhaps even include them in the skin, with your permission.

Note, that you will need this tool too.

Hero image slider

Previously, only the Photoblogger skin had an image slider in the hero area. Both Tiger and Story skins have received a hero image slider, which works differently from Photoblogger’s. This one selects random images from the whole album, subfolders included. It selects different images on every page load and takes the device’s screen size into account, selecting the images that fit best into the available screen space. This way you’ll hopefully see less beheaded portrait images on desktops. 🙂 Below you’ll find a few samples.

“Sticky” boxes

Using features like the Shopping cart, Feedback, or Filtering, the visitors might easily get lost when the associated boxes get out of the screen. You have to remember that there’s a filtering box on the top of the page, and if you’d like to change it, you have to scroll up (and down again). These so-called “sticky boxes” stay in the viewport as long as you are browsing the thumbnails. Look for the “Always visible” setting on the related settings panel! These boxes have also received a minimize/maximize button in case they are too large, and cover too much of the screen. In Photoblogger skin, the sidebar boxes have received a similar treatment, but here the boxes stay put in the sidebar, not covering the main block.

Tiger

Photoblogger

The top bar in the Tiger and Photoblogger skins, (and the similarly functioning “Control bar” in the Story skin) have received the same “Stick to top” feature, so the visitors can always access the important navigational elements.

Let us know what you think! (laza@jalbum.net)

Laza