A New Beginning

About five years ago I made flashimagegallery.com for a little flash file that I used to make an image gallery. I thought that eventually people would stop using it since it is old and built on archaic actionscript 1 (maybe 2, I really can't remember it's been so long). To my surprise, interest in it has been steady for the last five years. I could never keep up with the emails so I just gave up. There were just too many things going on to try and maintain a free side project. It wasn't worth the time.

A couple months ago I started looking at the latest version of Actionscript 3. I wanted to learn it again and decided a good start would be remaking a flash image gallery. It's been a struggle to find the time, but it's nearly finished. The website will be remade and will have a forum for frequent questions, feature requests, bugs, and help. I will be making updates to this blog for news.

I am hoping to have a figLite and a figPro. The free figLite will have basic features, more on those below. The figPro will be actively updated with feedback from people and also my own ideas. I have no idea if the figPro idea will fly with people. I'm a complete newbie with this, but I don't have the time to maintain a free product indefinitely.

figLite will have these features:

• Free for personal use
  
• Unlimited galleries
• Up to 30 pictures per gallery (figPro is unlimited)
• Any size thumbnails
• Any size of images
• Can be embedded in any web page at any size
• Full screen mode
  
• Simple to use (upload files and images, run a php script to make thumbnails, good to go)
• Simple interface
• Two themes - black and white (figPro will have more)
  
• Use any language for menu items
• Use any system font and change font sizes
  

There will not be a web backend for uploading images at the start, but this will actually be a benefit. I am hoping FIG can possibly be integrated into various CMS systems and they can act as backend administrations. I really like expressionengine right now, so maybe that could be a possibility to start.

Now here is where some feedback would be good. I was thinking that the figPro version could sell for $25 for one license on any site and this would allow for 6 months of updates (No actionscript source included). At the start it will only be different from the lite version by having unlimited pictures per gallery and changing the colors, but here are some of the features that I was thinking could be integrated over time:

• Video and mp3 support
• Basic html pages
• Flickr and Google Picasa support
  
• Anything else I can think of, maybe some unique theming options
• Integration into some CMS systems as said above

My only question is whether or not people will be willing to pay for the pro version. I'm not really comfortable selling the source for it at the moment as my code is horrendous. I have been learning Actionscript 3 all over again so you can imagine.

I will be posting a link to a demo of the new version soon. "Soon" is relative (like about a week).