trisweb.com

To all Zenphoto users – Zenphoto has a new release out yet again, 1.1.3! This version has much improved setup, which now does a systems check and lets you know if anything needs to be fixed before installation. It’s much easier and more intuitive than before, so it should help anyone get started easily. There are many other improvements and bugfixes as well, but instead of talking about them here, I’m going to direct you to the release entry on the new Zenphoto.org web site!

That’s right, Zenphoto.org has a new design and new useful features, like a blog, theme browser, and showcase gallery that shows off some great Zenphoto installations from around the web. The new site was designed and developed by Malte (acrylian) and Mark (aitf311) and looks excellent! Make sure to go check it out.

Since Zenphoto has a new blog, the release announcements will now be made there instead of here. I’ll keep making entries here for each release right now, but please switch your RSS feeds to the new one, located here: http://www.zenphoto.org/category/release/feed/. It should be the main source for Zenphoto information from now on. The main blog can also be found at http://www.zenphoto.org/category/News/.

Congratulations yet again to the Zenphoto team for the new site and another great release. We hope you enjoy it. Happy holidays!

Following last week’s highly successful and well-reviewed 1.1 release, we’re already keeping up with the bug fixes and improvements.

1.1.2 is a small release that fixes all the reported bugs from 1.1 so far, including some bad installation problems with 1.1.1. It also adds a few useful features. You can read more about it and download it on Zenphoto’s home page, as usual.

Go to Zenphoto.org to download or read more.

Update: 1.1.2 released on 11/8/2007 to fix the installation bugs. If you tried 1.1.1 and it didn’t work, try again with 1.1.2, it should be fine.

I am happy to announce, on behalf of the Zenphoto development team, the release of Zenphoto 1.1!

Go get zenphoto 1.1 now!

First, I’d like to give a warning to upgraders—you’ll need to move your zp-config.php file from the /zen/ folder to the new /zp-core/ folder. We just renamed it, but I know that’s going to be confusing, so I’m reiterating it everywhere I can. After the upgrade you should delete the /zen/ folder.

Ok, now that’s done, here’s what’s new in this release:

• Sub-Albums – fully supported in the Admin and all themes.
• Tags – enter tags in a text field on albums or images, and then you can…
• Search! Searches within tags, album titles/descriptions, image titles/descriptions, and other text fields.
• RSS Feeds for the gallery and albums.
• EXIF/IPTC reading and display – IPTC Titles and descriptions are loaded when images are loaded, EXIF is displayed in a nice table.
• Video support (.flv, etc.) by Zenvideo
• Preliminary Plugin support
• Sp@m filtering for comments
• Geospatial visualization – maps photos by geocoded metadata onto a Google map.
• Image archives by date
• Even more, lots more.

Wow. That’s a lot of new features. And what’s even more incredible is that I cannot take responsibility for any of them. I helped out here and there, but mostly did nothing, as I still don’t have the time to dedicate. The release was made possible by many people, but I want to thank Stephen B. (sbillard), Mark (aitf311), and Malte (acrylian) in particular because they did by far the most work for 1.1.

I know I am never satisfied with anything; I feel like a bad parent to this project sometimes, when at some point I simply should let go and let the new team have their own spotlight. This is that moment. They deserve all the credit and more for the great things in Zenphoto 1.1, while I take full blame for the delay in getting it to you all. There are still some known issues, but none of them are important enough to hold up a release. I apologize for that, and I hope I can do better in the future.

This is truly a great achievement, and I am truly impressed with how it has come together. Look forward to more releases in the future with less time in-between, and for now, enjoy your photographs as displayed by Zenphoto. Thank you.

[Note: due to a bug in Wordpress (which is fixed in 2.3.1 which I just upgraded to) this post couldn’t be in the zenphoto category and the ‘Release Announcements’ category at the same time. Sorry if those of you subscribed to the ‘zenphoto’ feed didn’t hear about it until now!]

November 2nd, 2007.

Sorry folks, needed more testing and a few bugfixes first. Out soon!

I’m staying in Boston working on my new startup with my business partner, who has a luxurious and geeked out condo here. Boston is a very interesting city. It’s completely different from what I’m used to, the young frontier of San Francisco and Berkeley. There’s a more mature feel to it for some reason, like everyone knows it’s been around for a really long time and they’re proud of it. Or maybe I’ve just been eating at too many upscale restaurants, I’m not sure.

Tonight we ate at a nice little pub in Harvard square called Grafton Street, so I’m practically a namesake. As a matter of fact, though, I’m more of a namesake than the Harvard grads – the names “Harvard” and “Harward” both came from “Here-weard”, old English for “army warden” (thanks to Tara for finding that out for me!). Clearly, “Harward” is closer to the original. I’m glad I didn’t go to Harvard or I would have a hell of a time not being a pretentious prick by explaining that to people every chance I got.

I haven’t done the history tours yet, but I’m really looking forward to it. Even driving around the streets here feels like a history tour, and it’s really cool to be in the middle of it for a bit, even if I am working most of the time.

Development is going fast—we started 4 months ago in Java EE and the Java Server Faces framework, but found it didn’t meet our needs to produce a truly rich user interface with a reasonable amount of effort. More on that later.

Two (working) weeks ago we evaluated our options and switched to Adobe Flex with a Ruby on Rails backend. In two weeks we had caught up with our previous Java prototype and we’ve seen major progress this week beyond our expectations. We’re a lot happier working in Flex and Rails (me especially, being a UI snob and all) and much more efficient too.

I have a few posts I’ve been meaning to write on why we chose the platforms we did. I will surely get to them this week, so stay tuned.

On top of that, we’re making great progress on Zenphoto! I’m sure you’re all happy to hear that finally. Version 1.1 is almost out the door, and it will be the first non-beta feature-complete version of Zenphoto, with tons of new features, bug fixes, speed improvements, and more. It’s looking and working great and staying as simple and elegant as it was from day one. I’d like to thank the whole team for their hard work in making this happen, and all the Zenphoto users out there for being so patient. I’m really impressed with how it’s coming together in a true open source manner.

So, back to Boston – the time change is very annoying. I’m trying to wake up early, but it’s hard to get to bed early enough too. And there’s always something else to do, it never stops. So I had better get to sleep on East Coast time, in my sofa bed in an office walled in whiteboards and computer monitors. Goodnight

It’s not hard to realize that starting a company is hard work—it just is. And I’m doin it. It’s incorporated, a real corporation, with prototypes and models and a business plan, and it’s going somewhere. Probably somewhere you’ll never see, but somewhere none the less—it’s software for a specific industry where good interface design is a nonexistent far-off dream, so it’s a good niche to be in. I’ll update as I can.

Unfortunately all this hard work means that trisweb.com has been on the back burner. It’s always sort of been that way, if you haven’t noticed, and it probably always will, but just thought you’d like to know that posts may be fewer. However, I did just upgrade to Wordpress 2.2, so maybe that’ll be some incentive.

I’ll try to keep on working on Zenphoto, and I expect complaints to abound, but I just don’t have the time to give to it right now. Starting a company, you know. But I’ll try to set aside some time. The sub-albums management interface is a needed addition for a 1.1 release, following which it should remain stably usable for a while. We’ve got EXIF in SVN and I just saw a Google-maps geospatial view addition posted to Trac (thanks for that) which I’ll try to add. Point: I’ll keep making progress, but slowly, sorry as usual for the delay.

If you want to help out, keep submitting patches and improvements on Trac, and if you get involved enough I’ll then give SVN commit privileges so the project can stay active even when I can’t give it time. Thanks to everyone who supports it, it’s been a real pleasure working with all of you so far, and I hope it will continue into the future in some manner.

Until next time, enjoy life

Lots of stuff been going on with me recently, best covered in list form:

• I took a small vacation last weekend and went Kayaking on Folsom Lake. It was fun. Much more upper-body exercise than I normally get


• I thought of a fun little new site and I need some opinions on it—it would be a repository of CSS style sheets that work with any well-formed XHTML page without modification. Real simple, real useful. Tell me what you think.


• Zenphoto 1.0.9 should be out soon, it just needs more testing. Check out the SVN and get to work! After that it should be no more than a couple months before 1.1 is fully ready, finally. Whew.


• My new computer is awesome. It’s incredible to have 2GB of RAM and practically never run out. I am satisfied.


• I got a featured picture on Wikipedia! Sweet!


• Anyone know of any good albums out recently? I’m getting tired of what I’ve been listening to and need something new…

Yep. That’s pretty much it. More interesting reading later!

I started working on a Zenphoto theme to sort of mimic the performance of Google’s Picasa Web Albums service (which is very nice, and was recently upgraded to 1 GB of free storage, see my public albums there for a good example).

Picasa-Web made huge strides in the usability of online photo viewing, in my opinion. The main advantage was the quick loading of previous and next images when browsing an album in the one-image view (where most browsing takes place, or at least, where the user cares most about speed). It was all done in JavaScript and AJAX, of course, and images were even loaded in low-res (pixelated) first so you at least saw something if you were too fast for your connection.

The other real speed improvement came unexpected—simply using the ‘onMouseDown’ event instead of ‘onClick’ to trigger the image switch. It’s incredible how much faster the first feels. It’s like the transition happens before you even thought about it, as if it’s somehow reading your mind. I guess that just shows how ingrained it is that actions happen when we lift the mouse button. That probably makes sense for most actions, but for browsing a photo gallery I can see why instant action is preferred—it feels fast, very fast.

So without further ado, I give you an image page with dynamic image loading and navigation. Please, browse, take a look, and tell me what you think.

Things that still aren’t complete include:

• Comments, loading and submitting for each image.
• Navigating to a specific image (currently always goes to the first)
• Browser history/back/forward preservation
• Full-sized or larger-sized image view, with Light/thick/slimbox etc. perhaps
• Better theme design—should be a good one.

so don’t complain about them just yet.

It’s a proof-of-concept, to prove that it’s possible (and quite easy) to make dynamic and fun themes with Zenphoto. All the framework for processing images, iterating over objects, and page handling is done by Zenphoto, leaving the theme developer to focus on the javascript design, which is the fun part of course Zenphoto also makes it easy to “fall back” to non-javascript behavior very easily (though this theme doesn’t show that).

I’ll work to complete this theme in the coming months, hopefully releasing it sometime soon in a more complete version. The code for the dynamic image navigation may also become a part of the Zenphoto core, at option to be turned on or off by the user. Themes wouldn’t even need to be changed to take advantage of it. Please, leave a comment, tell me what you think! Thanks.