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ShakeItPhoto Brings Polaroid to the iPhone

If this doesn't count as a silly gimmick, I don't know what does but it's pretty much irresistible as far as the fun factor goes.

ShakeItPhoto is as close as you'll get to the Polaroid experience on an iPhone (or any phone come to that). I love how they've captured that slightly faded, hazy kind of look that I always loved about real Polaroid film - oh and you get to do the whole shaking thing too!

Read more: http://shakeitphoto.com/

And check out the gallery on Flickr.

Pixaria 2.8.1 Released

I'm very happy to announce the release of Pixaria Gallery version 2.8.1 a major update bringing some exciting new features, improvements and enhancements. The big news in this update is the addition of a new improved news/blog publishing tool and comprehensive support for image geocoding and mapping.

This update also includes a large number of improvements to the Pixaria admin area including more reliable image importing, a new gallery browser tool, many enhancements to gallery workflow, built in documentation via the dashboard and many minor enhancements and bug fixes.

Because this update also includes some changes to parts of the front end, it's important to consult the release notes and change log before upgrading. All registered users can get the update for free by e-mailing [email protected].

As has happened on a number of occasions in the past, this update includes several contributions from a Pixaria user - Matthias Zehnder - and my thanks go to him for chosing to share his work with the Pixaria community and work with me on beta testing this release.

Gallery Maps Coming Soon

Following on from this week's post about the new gallery browser coming to the admin area of Pixaria, I thought I'd follow up with a new feature coming to the front end of the software.

Thanks to the hard work of Pixaria user Matthias Zehnder, the next software update will include a novel new way to browse galleries on an interactive map view which is powered by Google Maps. The gallery map view is administered via new 'GeoCodes' control panels in the admin area. From these control panels, it's possible to create geocodes for favourite locations and then assign these to images in your library. Once an image has been tagged with a geocode, any galleries in which it appears will automatically be included in the gallery map view.

I'll publish more information about how to work with geocodes and GPS location data in the next few days.

Photoshop Magic

Adobe Labs are, as ever, cooking up some truly unbelievable new tools that will be making their debut in future editions of Photoshop. For the latest preview, check out this video on John Nack's blog for a demo of an amazing new feature called 'Content Aware Fill'. It's worth watching the video right the way through because this is technology that's pretty much indistinguishable from magic.

Read more: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/03/caf_in_ps.html

New Gallery Browser Coming Soon

In response to a number of requests for better ways to manage large galleries, I'm working on a new gallery browser which will become the default view for galleries in the admin area of Pixaria Gallery. The new gallery browser provides a side panel with a collapsible, 'tree view' of all the galleries in the library and a preview panel to view details of the gallery and its contents on the right hand side.

In addition to the new gallery browser, I'm also working on improvements to the existing gallery list view which will make it possible to sort galleries by title, short title, hits, number of images and the gallery date. These improvements should be a big help to many of you with large libraries and if you have any ideas for further improvements, I'm always open to ideas..!

Cute iPhone Stand from magneticNorth

British design style rides once again with this cute and oh so simple iPhone stand. Damn, I wish I'd thought of it..! http://www.movie-peg.com/

Pixaria Roadmap Update

It's been a little while since my last update on the status of Pixaria Gallery so I thought that it was about time I talked briefly about some of the developments coming in the near future.

My roadmap for Pixaria releases this year has been defined by the short term goal of improving the e-commerce capabilities of the software, specifically adding coupons and discount codes and the ability to sell different types of products such as workshops, CD/DVD products and other non image related products. Once this is complete, the plan is then to follow this up with a complete overhaul of the front end user interface later in the year with the goal of making the design cleaner and easier to customise.

Alongside these big projects, I've also been working hard to fine tune the performance of the new importing tools in the Pixaria back end and to get the documentation fully up to date on its new content management system - something that's now finally complete.

Current status

With development on the big new features well under way, I wanted to share some details of how the addition of expanded product features will affect Pixaria Gallery's front end.

Where possible, I've tried to limit the amount of changes I make to the front end in recent updates because I know that it can be a nuisance to update customised templates. With the addition of coupon and product features however, I will have to make some significant changes to the front end to add product pages and to alter the shopping cart to handle coupons.

Because of this, I've decided that rather than re-use the current user interface elements and styles from Pixaria 2, now would be a good time to begin using the style sheet and layout elements that are planned for inclusion in Pixaria Gallery version 3.0. The advantage of this is that it will allow for some stress testing and feedback on the proposed changes and of course, less work will be required to upgrade to version 3.0.

The updated HTML and CSS components will make their debut in Pixaria Gallery version 2.8.1 and will include new templates for a user's account homepage, postcards, the news blog and completed purchases pages. The look and feel isn't massively different from the current default theme style in Pixaria but the HTML and CSS code is much more compact (with no tables) which will result in better page load times, simpler customisation, easier theming and most importantly, the possibility of colour scheme editing from the Appearance Settings control panel further down the line.

I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on these proposed changes and particularly how people feel about the plan to introduce the new CSS and HTML template code prior to the release of Pixaria 3.0.

User contributed features

Finally, an exciting development coming in the next release will be the inclusion of some interesting new features which have been kindly contributed by Matthias Zehnder, a Pixaria user in Switzerland. I will be providing more details about these new features nearer the release date but they include mapping tools, major improvements to the news blog, gallery announcement tools and numerous other small refinements.