So, thanks to everyone who’s given it a whirl and for all the positive feedback.  If the situation changes I’ll post back here.

Cheers

Martin

Thanks.

Anyway, as a result of Ian Dixon and Andrew Cherry launching their great new Made for Media Center site, I thought it would be prudent to update things on Photato’s own site so that things are in sync.   The download link on the home page now links to the most up-to-date version of Photato, which is 1.0.6.6.  I’ve been running this version for a few months on my main development machine which is Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit and it’s running fine, I won’t say it’s without issues, but generally it seems stable enough.  This isn’t the case for everyone sadly, it certainly seems users with Facebook accounts that have more than a couple of hundred friends are suffering from synchronisation and performance issues.  Hopefully I’m going to get some time before Xmas to look at the remaining issues, in the meantime please keep providing the feedback via the forum.

Thanks

UI bugs fixed:
Photo browser now displaying photos immediately rather than only after navigating away from post-it
Slideshow now displaying photos
Duplication of some tagged photos problem resolved

So, if you want to keep up with what’s happening with Photato and can’t be bothered with an RSS reader then simply follow us at twitter.com/armchairware.

The biggest change is that Photato now synchronises with Facebook every 24 hours (this period will be configurable but isn’t currently) rather than trying to pull the data down that the user requests as they request it. For various reasons the old communication method resulted in some poor performance hence the need to move to a synchronisation model. Once the initial synchronisation has finished (which can take a few minutes) then the performance of the add-in should be noticeably quicker, especially for photos of tagged friends. Subsequent synchronisations will then happen in the background as long as when you log-in you check the ‘keep me logged into Photato’ check-box.

Here’s a quick summary of the major improvements in this release:

- Supports Windows 7 RC1
- New Friends screen
- New Friend details screen
- Switch User functionality implemented
- Facebook Login screen now implemented as a popup dialog
- Synchronisation communication model via a Windows Service

I’d really appreciate as much feedback on this release as possible (ideally through the support forum) as I’m trying to get to a final release version of Photato as quickly as possible. Please report everything that you notice that’s not working as you’d expect, anything that appears to be working but you’d prefer to work differently or anything that’s not implemented but you’d like to see in the product. I am aware of a number of bugs both in UI and underlying Facebook access code but this version is certainly usable so please give it a go.

Thanks
Martin

Choosing a sort order

The sort order selection list is now clearer and on its own on the left side of the screen with the slideshow and/or reverse order buttons on the right of the screen.

Browse your friends

The Friends page has now been implemented with each friend’s current profile photo appearing in the stack of photos. You can jump to friends whose names begin with a particular letter by selecting a letter in the list on the left side of the screen. This also gives you a visual cue as to where you are in the stack as it updates as you navigate through the photos.

View friend details

Selecting a friend in the previous screen takes you to the details page for the friend where you can view their last status update, their album cover photos and their tagged photos. Selecting any of these will take you to the appropriate stacked photo view.

Hope you like them!

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Thanks.