Saturday, October 31, 2009

New Fig Demos

Here are a few demos of the new Fig I've been working on.

  • Demo 1 - default settings
  • Demo 2 - default settings, no navigation, loads a default gallery set in flashVar of HTML. This one also is embedding the flash file from Demo 1 and using it's pictures. This shows how the gallery can be embedded any where on a website by changing a few settings while still keeping your pictures in the same spot.
  • Demo 3 - black theme, different size thumbnails, different font face and size.
  • Demo 4 - black theme, sized to 100% of window, fake navigation items to display how navigation works, larger thumbnails with no padding and no border.
In Demo 4 you can also resize the window while a gallery is open to see how Fig will reorder the pictures as you resize the window. All of the demos use the same flash file that is in example 1 and are changed using settings from an XML file or flashVar's.

It will be available for download as soon as I get the website done with all the details on how to install and use it and set up a forum. I haven't made the PHP script that makes the thumbnails yet either. Might be a couple more weeks until the website is done as I am currently trying to work on some remodeling of my girlfriends house and that doesn't leave much time after work.

Tell me what you think so far and let me know if you see anything that looks like a bug.

Oh... all images used in the demos above are copyright their respective owners... whoever that may be.

Friday, October 16, 2009

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).