Hello,

Some time ago several clients told me that on some machines with Vista Image Uploader for Java was unable to initialize. Nothing was shown at all inside applet body. I tried to reproduce this bug but failed. Some of our clients (his name is Arthur) agreed to help me in fixing this problem. I have sent him about a dozen of log versions to find the real reason of the problem. The issue was in Vista operating system recognition. It turned out that not all JRE versions on Vista had «Vista» word in their os.name system property. On some JRE versions it contained «WindowsNT Unknown» value. Thus I have fixed this by adding one more case to OS type recognition algorithm. Now it looks to work fine. Thanks to Arthur one more time.

Hi All! 

I know that some of our clients have already upgraded their Mac OSes to Leopard. And some of these clients have already had some problems with Image Uploader running it on Leopard. Previously we had only Mac OS 10.3.4 and 1.4.something. Recently we have installed the third operating system on our pure Mac and now we can test it. If you have some problems specific for Leopard please, post your information to forum. Now we can check and fix it.

Hello,

We worked on the thumbnail generation problem resolution last few months and here I will write about the results.

Image Uploader for Java 4.x used JIMI image processing library from Sun to as one of two variants of image processing. The other variant was ImageIO. JIMI worked on Macs better thus we have even made some versions where JIMI was used on Macs. But JIMI library is a very old and it was a reason of tons of memory problems. That's why we removed JIMI library usage methods from Image Uploader 5.0. I have almost no memory problem reports on Image Uploader 5.0. But I have a lot of Mac problem reports now. Looking through Java image processing blogs and forums I've realised we are not so bad in image processing but it does not help us: the images are still not created. There are two variants to solve the problem:

1)      Try to make image processing with ImageIO better on Macs.

2)      Get JIMI back.

While our ActiveX version developers worked on security problems with ActiveX version of Image Uploader, the Java version guys were trying to make image processing on Macs (and PCs) work better. We have tried to use QuickTime which is a part of any Mac OS but it failed to read big thumbnails. Also we have tried to implement tile image load but as a result got long periods of image reading.

After all we have improved current image processing algorithm. We have tested it on Macs and PCs and it looks to work much better. I hope your tests will show the same situation. If not we will get JIMI code back for Mac users.

So you could download Image Uploader 5.1 where the changes are applied and write about the results. If the result of our work does not help, we will get JIMI back for Mac users.

By the way our tests on PC show that big thumbnails are generated better too. Hope not only on our machines.

Hello,

I have posted one more Aurigma Community project – Multiple Upload plug-in for WordPress. You could read about it in this post.

I think this plug-in is a good example of what we are (Aurigma team) moving to (one of our goals): we are making our products usage more simple that it is now. The first project was ASP.NET control when you could simply drag'n'drop it to the page, adjust its properties and ImageUploader insertion code created automatically. WordPress plug-in is the next step. You just copy its files to the plug-ins folder, activate it via administration panel and it starts working. What would be the next step? You could post your ideas about possible answer here.

Hello All!

I have great news for you! We have released Image Uploader 5.0 at last. This new version is more stable, there are many interesting features in it. We have really made a great work on it. You can read the full feature list here. As for me I would like to tell my own thoughts about this new version. Some time ago I started making a list of ideas to be added and problems to be fixed in Image Uploader. Some of the ideas were difficult to be done but we understood that we have to do it. Here is a list of the features which (as I think) our clients will like:

1. Vista native view – first version of Image Uploader with Vista support (no crushes, correct upload) was v4.1. Starting from v5.0 for ActiveX it has native view on this operating system. Now we are using Vista interface drawing APIs. As for Java version, we are waiting for JRE with Vista look-and-feel to be implemented.
2. Configurable POST request format. Let me describe what it means. Image Uploader had its own sequence of fields (FileCount, PackageIndex, PackageCount and so on) with concrete names (e.g. Thumbnail1_1). It was not very convenient in some situations:
   • If you wanted to insert Image Uploader to any content management system (CMS) he should write your own upload processing code even if there has been upload functionality before in this CMS. Some our clients have even ordered a private label versions with custom field names to avoid CMS scripts changing.
   • If you wanted any open API to store your images on flickr.com or similar site you had to write some complex upload processing scripts to resend images after upload to flickr.com in the target website API proprietary format.
   Now you are able to rename any field in POST request or even turn all textual fields of to add only your own in format that you need.
3. Full thumbnail generation classes rewritten in Image Uploader for Java. We and our clients have been waiting for this for a long time. The most inconvenient thing in Image Uploader for Java is its thumbnail generator which was not as stable as everybody would like it to be. We have spent a lot of time trying to find any image processing library but were not successful until recently. Our testing has shown that almost all the problems were while making thumbnails via JIMI. When thumbnails were made via ImageIO almost everything was OK. Thus, we decided to disable JIMI usage in Image Uploader for Java (by the way, as a result ImageUploader5.cab is 100 kb smaller than ImageUploader2.cab). As a result Image Uploader for Java supports less image formats but we have found a solution to add additional file formats support for our clients who need it. I will describe additional format support feature in my future posts. So by now Image Uploader 5.0 uses only one image processing library, ImageIO. As for resize modes, we have made a lot of testing on tons of images and made appropriate parameter sets for all resize quality modes.
4. Zip compression feature. That is not only one more supported format. We have added the ability to specify how to save bandwidth for any type of files. Before Image Uploader 5.0, there was only the ability to resize images and make JPEG thumbnails. Now it's possible to specify for example to make JPEGs for all image files and Zips for all other or make JPEGs for all files and on fail make Zips, or make JPEGs and on fail send original files (remember FallbackMode property? ;) ). So now Image Uploader helps to compress not only images but also any other type of file.
5. Other features are important too and I will try to describe it in my future posts.

Anyway, hope you like the new version of Image Uploader!

 

Image Uploader 5.0 Dual is going to be released in the middle of December 2007. Here is the list of main improvements in this version:

1. Native view on Vista.
2. Enhanced capabilities of One Pane mode:
   • DropFilesHere image – you can show any image instead of text now.
   • Background image – you can put your logo right to upload pane.
   • Cusmomizible button view – you can specify specific image for any button state.
   • Instant upload - upload process starts right after selecting files.
3. More control over upload process:
   • Additional events: PackageBeforeUpload, PackageError, PackageComplete and PackagProgress.
   • Ability to uncheck specific files from JavaScript.
   • Restore upload pane content to implement any several steps order etc.
4. Zip-archive compression – you can compress files before uploading, not only make thumbnails.
5. Image Uploader POST request format changing – you can change the format of upload request to add Image Uploader to any popular CMS, blogging system etc. without server side scripts changing.

Here is how it looks now on Vista:

   

So if you are interesting feel free to write us.

We have a huge feedback from our clients: we have a lot of emails, forum messages, calls etc. every day. And you know, sometimes we get brilliant ideas about how to use our products for different tasks. Also we have a lot of questions about how to do this and how to do that. Some ideas are interesting for a lot of our clients. Thus we will make Aurigma Forge, the resource where such ideas implementation articles will be stored.

At the nearest time I'm going to post some articles there. I will describe the new samples of Image Uploader usage. Other members of our team will write their articles too. And we are waiting for such posts from you. I'm sure there are more tasks our products could help with so let's put these ideas together.

At the nearest time the new resource will be created. It will be named Aurigma Forge. We know that our clients have a lot of experience in using such popular products as Image Uploader and Graphics Mill for .NET so Aurigma Forge will be the best place to show your skills to the others. We are going to post our ideas here too.