iPhone Application

We are very close to completing an iPhone/iPodTouch application that will view an iPhotoWebShare site. Viewing iPhotoWebShare pages in Safari on the iPhone doesn't work very well. This application will display thumbnails and photos in much the same way as the standard Photos application.

Custom Themes

Several people have expressed interest in making their own layout theme for iPhotoWebShare. We are preparing a document that shows the steps needed, but I can get you started quicker with this blog post. For the purpose of this mini-tutorial, let's assume you want to tweak the default layout.

1. In your Mac account you need to create the target folder for the new layout. Open the "Library/Application Support" folder. In it, create an "iPhotoWebShare" folder. In it, create a "layouts" folder. Finally, in this folder, create an "Example" folder.
2. Find where the iPhotoWebShare Preference Pane is stored. It may be easiest to simply open our DMG file and use the executable in it. Select iPhotoWebShare.prefPane while holding down the control key. This will bring up a pop-up menu. Select "Show Package Contents". Navigate to "Contents/Resources/layouts/Default".
3. Drag all the files in the folder into your new Example folder.
4. Edit the Layout.xml file in your Example folder to give it a new name.

At this point, the new layout should be selectable in the iPhotoWebShare preference pane. Any tweaks you make will only affect this theme. Also note that the Example folder is safe from iPhotoWebShare upgrades since it isn't in the package contents.

I'll try to finish the official tutorial in the upcoming weeks, but this should get you started.

iPhotoWebShare 2.0 is out!

After an obnoxiously long delay, we've released iPhotoWebShare 2.0! This version has several improvements:

Themes -- We've added theme support! In order to support this, much of iPhotoWebShare was rewritten. We think the effort was definitely worth it. We include two layouts to choose from. Each layout has a half-dozen color schemes to choose from. I'm working on a document for people with web development skills explaining how one could create their own theme.

Image Quality Controls -- The preference pane contains controls that select the quality level of images and thumbnails. This allows users to tune image file size to speed up access to their site.

Supports iPhoto '08 and '09 Libraries -- The last two versions of iPhoto store their libraries in a "package", rather than a folder. Our library selection didn't support packages; now it does.

iPWS detection -- Previous versions of iPWS had a bug where the preference pane didn't always detect whether iPWS was running. We've implemented an alternate way of detecting it and it seems to work well.

Finally, we want to thank all our beta testers for helping out! Thank you for your time and your input!

Latest News

Hello!

It's been quite a while since our last post so we wanted to inform you of what's been going on.

• We switched our site's host to Host Monster. The switch happened efficiently and correctly (we thought we'd be fighting for weeks trying to wrestle our domain from the previous host.) The technical support at Host Monster is also terrific.
• We, at bitpatterns, have been revamping iPhotoWebShare. We're getting close to releasing the new version (v2.0) to beta testers. If anyone would like to help test out the new version, let us know!
• The current version of iPhotoWebShare works with iLife '08, so go ahead and upgrade.

With respect to v2.0, the biggest change is support for themes! Most of the last year we spent fighting with the various browsers trying to get the themes work in all of them. It appears we'll have three themes available for the release, although I think only one is fully usable by Internet Explorer. All work great in Safari, Firefox, and Opera.

Stay tuned for the beta! (and thanks for your patience!)

bitpatterns Home Page is Moving

Our web site is temporarily down. We're moving to a different web host provider and are in the process of moving the domain. Sorry for the disruption.