What’s new on the skin development front?

While we often communicate what’s new with jAlbum, only a few of you follow the advancements in skin development by reading those hidden skin update logs. Here are some of the most interesting new skin features.

It all started with Story skin, which made custom pages even more useful, by allowing them to hold just any (textual) content. This combined with the ability to mix them into the images allowed authoring complex, blog-like webpages, that barely resembled the conventional, square thumbnail grid galleries.

This change, however, made custom pages look broken after changing skins. I realized this when I made a modern sample album, but it turned ugly playing with skins. I guess this is what most new users do too, and might hit the user experience badly.

So I revisited all of the bundled skins and modernized them. Tiger skin is still to be done, but Animatics, Lucid, Photoblogger, Projector, and Story have received substantial updates recently. Besides changing the custom page layout a lot of other improvements were implemented. Some of these were deep changes like an organ transplant. Hopefully, this will result in up-to-date skins, that match modern browser design and are easier to maintain in the future. Here are some of the highlights:

Instant preview in the User Interface

After discovering small browser windows can be embedded into the user interface, I started adding this component to my skins. This makes the effect of certain skin settings instantly comprehensible, saving a lot of guesswork for users.

Custom pages

Embedding custom pages into the index page is enabled in the Photoblogger skin too. In the future, this possibility will also be added to Projector and Tiger skins.

New custom pages: Calendar and Newimages are now available with all these skins. Calendar collects all images into a calendar-like layout with links to the original folders, while Newimages collects all images created (or modified) within a timeframe. Let me remind you these custom pages work the best when placed at the top level, and instead of renaming the file, it’s much better to use the Title field to provide the title, e.g. “New images”, which is grammatically correct.

Optimizations

Such complex pages are hard to load for the browser, so the new updates bring optimizations for quicker and device-specific loading of gallery pages. For instance, the skin now preloads the icon fonts and the folder image, so it loads the page with less “Flash Of Unstyled Content” from now on. The thumbnail layouts were also optimized so they don’t jump around while loading in Story and Photoblogger skins. I fixed the progressive load function, which makes the page ready much earlier.

Cross-skin translation tool

To have more skins receive the most localizations I made a handy tool that gathers texts from other skins, to save time for translators. This tool also helps me to find all the texts used in the source files.