Armchairware blog

Vote for Photato!

mthornal — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:52:51 +0000

As mentioned in my previous post, Photato has been nominated in the Best free Windows Media Center application category for this year’s DigitalLifestyle.com Awards. The voting is now open so if you’ve enjoyed using Photato and want to see it develop further then the best way to show your appreciation is to vote for it here.

Thanks.

DigitalLifestyle.com Awards nomination

mthornal — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:35:47 +0000

I’ve just noticed that Photato has been nominated in the Best free Windows Media Center application category for the upcoming DigitalLifestyle.com Awards. That’s great news but wouldn’t it be great if it won the category? There’s some tough competition but soon you’ll have a chance to show your appreciation for the work that’s gone into Photato so far. When the voting opens I’ll post the link on the blog.

Made for Media Center

mthornal — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:52:46 +0000

So it’s been a few month’s since my last post. For those of you who were concerned, it wasn’t anything to do with the kitesurfing course I mentioned, it’s just that I’ve been busy with other projects. Unfortunately generating income needs to take precedence over the development of Photato.

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.

Photato 1.0.6.3 available

mthornal — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:24:37 +0000

I’ve been working this week mostly on making the Facebook synchronisation service more robust, but I’ve also fixed a few minor (but irritating) UI bugs. I’m still categorising this release as experimental but it is a significant improvement over the previous experimental releases. Once I’ve had a few more people try this release and I’m happy it’s working ok then I’ll promote it to the download link on the home page. For now you can download it here. As always if you have any problems please report them in the forum, although I’m away for the next 3 days on a kitesurfing course so I’ll only be able to respond to queries when I get back.

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

Armchairware now tweeting

mthornal — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:59:45 +0000

I guess we’re a little late joining the party but better late than never I suppose. As you’ve probably worked out from the title you can now follow what’s happening at Armchairware using your favourite Twitter client. All the blog posts will appear on Twitter courtesy of those nice people at twitterfeed and who knows we may even post some extra nuggets directly on Twitter too.

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.

Photato 1.0.6.1 available

mthornal — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:12:01 +0000

Just a quick post to say that I’ve released a minor update of Photato. This release includes a few small fixes to the Windows Service and I’ve added logging to the Windows Event Log to help with diagnosing problems. This is still an experimental release and is not yet available through the download link on the main site. Follow this link to the Support Forum post to download it and for more details.

Photato 1.0.6.0 available

mthornal — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:41:50 +0000

You can download the 1.0.6.0 release of Photato here. Please be aware that this is an experimental release rather than a beta as there is a significant amount of code that has been rewritten compared to the previous beta release and hence is only available through the link above and in the support forum. The version on the homepage download link will remain as the 1.0.5.0 beta for the time being. The idea with this release is that it will be tested by those of you who want to be at the bleeding edge so that I can iron out the major bugs before making a general release of the next beta.

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

New screen shots

mthornal — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:35:27 +0000

Here are a few screen shots of some of the new UI features that are being added to the upcoming release of Photato.

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!

Blog now using Feedburner

mthornal — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:08:57 +0000

I’ve just started using Feedburner to help keep track of who’s reading the blog. The links for both the Entries and Comments feeds are now being diverted through Feedburner and have been updated on the blog pages. If you are already a subscriber it would help me if you could update your feed reader to use the Feedburner sources which can be found below rather the original feeds you may have subscribed to.

Entries feed - http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ArmchairwareBlog

Comments feed - http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ArmchairwareBlogComments

Don’t worry if you haven’t got time to do that right now, the old links will continue to work, but I just won’t know that you’re a subscriber until you do.

Thanks.

Photato development resumes

mthornal — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:34:19 +0000

So things have been somewhat quiet on Photato over the last few months, mainly because I’ve been working on a third party Media Center add-in (details to follow shortly). I am now working to get the Photato beta into a reasonable state for release. I’m mainly looking at improving the performance for users with lots of friends and photos and ensuring it works on Windows 7, but I’d also like to improve the login experience.

The main problem with logging in is that Facebook require desktop apps to use their own login web page. This makes it difficult for Media Center add-ins and pretty much impossible to enable a true 10 foot login experience i.e. using just a remote control. The current beta uses a Media Center HTML page with the Facebook login web page embedded within it. This does work (with some limitations) but is difficult to implement and even though it does display within the Media Center app you still need a keyboard to enter your details. Early versions of the beta used a seperate popup window for logging in which worked well but was even less integrated into Media Center. I’m thinking of going back to this approach to keep things simple, but it’d be good to get some feedback on this. Logging in is only something that is done occasionally so it’s not too big a deal, but I’d still like to make as easy to do as possible. So, if you have any views on this, please add your comments below.

Thanks.