BluPlusPlus Changes History

BluPlusPlus skin Changes History

BluPlusPlus 4.4 - July 23, 2009 - Changes since 4.3

Viewer Remarks notification email templates have been externalized into separate files in "/res/php" directory. In this way, any user may have his own customized templates for notification emails. Moreover, there are some new variables introducted to be used in templates.
Requester: Andrew Main
In the case any missing information in "cameras.properties" of BluPlusPlus, the system-level "cameras.proprties" which comes pre-bundled with JAlbum will be used instead.
Wrong 35mm Focal Length Multipliers in "cameras.properties" have been fixed.
Reporter: Ivaylo Stoimenov
A problem with sending Viewer Remarks's notification e-mails, which was affecting some of the SMTP servers, has been resolved.
Reporter: Lothar Jansen
Bug-Fix: The broken link from original image page to normal slide page has been fixed.
Reporter: jgb
A small typo in French translation has been fixed.
Reporter: JeanPierre

BluPlusPlus 4.3 - May 29, 2008 - Changes since 4.2

A problem with internationalization support (which had been broken in JAlbum v8.0.8) has been fixed.
Some minor typos have been corrected.

BluPlusPlus 4.2 - May 27, 2008 - Changes since 4.1

BluPlusPlus is fully JAlbum 8.0 compliant now. JAlbum v8.0.8 is the minimum requirement.

BluPlusPlus 4.1 - November 28, 2007 - Changes since 4.0

Hebrew is now a supported language.
Great thanks to Micky Kendler
Chinese language pack has been updated.
Great thanks to Brian Ng.
French language pack has been updated.
Great thanks to Christian Kaspar & G?rard Tayeb
The 35mm Focal Length Multipliers file (cameras.properties) has been updated. Hundreds of new cameras have been added!
Bug-Fix: Audio files now behave correctly when processed as standalone files (as opposed to non-standalone voice annotations that play when slide images are displayed).
Reporter: Jaap Derks

BluPlusPlus 4.0 - February 06, 2007 - Changes since 3.12

BluPlusPlus is fully JAlbum 7.0 compliant now. And folder icons for virtual folders work! JAlbum v7.0.3 is the minimum requirement.
Viewer Remarks now supports Postgresql as well as mysql databases.
Thanks to Robert Camner
Viewer Remarks now supports CAPTCHA security images (requiring the user to type a partially obscured set of characters before submitting a remark).
Thanks to Robert Camner
Viewer Remarks now has an optional moderation mode (remarks must be approved by a moderator before appearing on slide or index pages).
Thanks to Robert Camner
The Remarks Administration console has been redesigned to make it easier to edit, delete, and approve remarks.
Thanks to Robert Camner
Support for .asf, .wvx and .asx movie types.
Reporter: Matt
Users may now add additional video and audio types to BluPlusPlus via 'supported-audios.txt' and 'supported-videos.txt' files (in the 'BluPlusPlus/config' folder).
Users may customize the HTML code blocks for video and audio files.
The German language pack has been updated.
Great thanks to Michael Fichmann
The Danish language pack has been updated.
Great thanks to Erik Toft
The 35mm Focal Length Multipliers file (cameras.properties) has been updated to include more cameras and models.
Bug-Fix: Single quotation marks in the metadata for photos or folders (e.g. in the name or comment) no longer ruin the statusbar text.
Reporter: Tommy Huynh

BluPlusPlus 3.12 - October 25, 2006 - Changes since 3.11

Added HTML Meta Tags support for album pages ('BluPlusPlus > General' tab).
Viewer Remarks count may now displayed under thumbnails and folders on index pages.
The Viewer Remarks section may now be set to open only when remarks are present (always closed and always open remain options).
Slide Breadcrumb Trail Content field ('BluPlusPlus > Slide' tab) now supports file type, size, dimension and date in the top bar breadcrumb trail.
A new field, Index Breadcrumb Trail Content ('BluPlusPlus > Index' tab), permits users to specify the folder slide count and folder date in the top bar breadcrumb trail on index pages.
Two new fields, Slide HTML Title and Index HTML Title have been added to the 'BluPlusPlus > Slide' and 'BluPlusPlus > Index' tabs which allows customization of the browser page title for generated slide and index pages.
Requester: Matt (mlbillow)
Bug-Fix: Viewer Remarks author's name containing an apostrophe now displays correctly in the Admin console.
The credit goes to Robert Camner
Bug-Fix: A problem with Slide Show on websites with banners and advertisements (using javascript) has been fixed.
Reporter: Magnafreak
Bug-Fix: First & Last slides were shifted sideways when thumbnail borders were used. This is fixed now!
Reporter: Kevirving

BluPlusPlus 3.11 - September 06, 2006 - Changes since 3.10

35mm Focal Length Multipliers file (cameras.properties) has been updated to include more cameras and models.
Bug-Fix: The long-standing "Cannot instantiate non-existent class userremarks..." issue with viewer Remarks feature has been fixed.
Credits go to Malev and Robert Camner
Bug-Fix: An OutOfMemoryException has been fixed when the rows count was set zero in 'Thumbnail Layout' and there were nested folders.
Reporter: Malev
Bug-Fix: A NullPointerException has been fixed with the photos which do not have any camera information embedded.
Reporter: Guy P
Bug-Fix: A problem with adding viewer remarks to photos which had apostrophe in their file name has been fixed.
Credits go to Jon Freivald and Robert Camner
Bug-Fix: A small typo in Romanian translation.
Thanks to Alexandru Tudor Constantinescu
Bug-Fix: No more (already handled) error's log is printed in console mode.
Reporter: Peter Haartsen

BluPlusPlus 3.10 - July 08, 2006 - Changes since 3.9

".3gp" (usually produced by mobile phones) is supported movie type now!
Reporter: Robert Camner
Some JDK 1.5 specific APIs had been used to fix the 'Exposure Time' formatting, which caused BluPlusPlus not to run under JDK 1.4. It has been fixed now and working again both with JDK 1.4 and 1.5.
Reporter: Nick A. Carter
Bug-Fix: 'folderTitle' variable in meta.properties works again!
Reporter: Niko
Bug-Fix: BPP now handles filenames with periods (dots or fullstops) correctly at the Jump-To-Page dropdown menu at the top bar. No more broken links are generated there.
Reporter: Jo Anne Gould
A typo in French language pack has been corrected.
Credits go to John Keyston

BluPlusPlus 3.9 - June 22, 2006 - Changes since 3.8

Slide page comments can now be turned on or off by a new checkbox on the the BluPlusPlus-Slide tab.
BluPlusPlus now supports .thm files (generated by Canon and Sony cameras on producing movies) as thumbnails for movies as an alternative to the generic movie icon.
A new field, Breadcrumb Trail Content (at 'BluPlusPlus > Slide' tab), permits users to specify the image title, image filename, or any EXIF/IPTC field at the slide's top bar breadcrumb trail.
Requester: ernst42
To better integrate with the new features at the JAlbum Edit tab, BPP no longer distinguishes between the various sources of comments. 'EmbeddedComment', 'InternalComment', and 'ExternalComment' have been deprecated and replaced by the single parameter 'Comment' in the Thumbnail Caption Comment and Thumbnail Tooltip Comment on the BPP-Index tab and Slide Caption Content on the BPP-Slide tab.
A typo in German language pack has been fixed.
Reporter: Michael Welle
Bug-Fix: The display of Exposure Time in the EXIF information is now formatted correctly.
Great thanks to Andy Kirkland
Bug-Fix: In JAlbum 6.1.6 and later, "Copy Originals" was disabled whenever "Link to scaled-down images only" was selected, and it cheated BPP on some of its functionality. This has been fixed.
Bug-Fix: when 'Use thumbnail for folder icon' is selected and there is no photo inside a folder BPP now uses a generic folder icon.

BluPlusPlus 3.8 - January 27, 2006 - Changes since 3.7

Viewer Remarks are now optionally available on index pages.
Requester: Arn Hyndman
Croatian language pack has been updated.
Great thanks to Ivo
Dutch language pack has been updated.
Great thanks to Hugo Geyskens
The new features provided by JAlbum's improved 'Edit' tab and the new "Use thumbnail for folder icon" option on the 'Advanced' tab, are fully supported.
If both "Link to scaled down images only" and "Copy originals" are checked on the JAlbum-Main tab, a "download image" icon and link will be generated under each scaled slide image. In this way, you may have both Move-Forward Facility and original image download link active.
".divx" and ".xvid" are supported movie types now!
Reporter: G_ROM
The "Choose Random Icon for Folders" option on the BPP-General tab has been removed as JAlbum now supports this feature directly via the "Use thumbnail for folder icon" option on the JAlbum Advanced-Main tab.
Bug-Fix: The Viewer Remarks feature now works correctly on servers that do not recognize the "<?...?>" notation as a valid PHP code block.
Great thanks to Robert Camner
Bug-Fix: Nikon cameras' focal length multipliers have been corrected in "cameras.properties"; thus the 35mm equivalent focal lengths are calculated correctly.
Reporter: Theron Keller

BluPlusPlus 3.7 - October 29, 2005 - Changes since 3.6

Croatian is now a supported language.
Great thanks to Ivo
Romanian is now a supported language.
Great thanks to Alexandru Tudor Constantinescu
Dutch language pack has been updated.
Great thanks to Lennart Aangeenbrug
Bug Fix: An issue with all-numeric album titles has been resolved.
Reporter: Arnar Sigmundsson
Bug-Fix: A security hole in the Viewer Remarks feature has been fixed through which a malicious user could bypass the login process to enter Admin mode.
Great thanks to Robert Camner
Bug-Fix: Viewer remarks with unclosed embedded html tags are now handled correctly.
Great thanks to Robert Camner
Bug-Fix: A cosmetic Frame Preview bug has been fixed.
Reporters: Paul Van Cotthem, Robert Camner & Al Geddis

BluPlusPlus 3.6 - August 13, 2005 - Changes since 3.5

Hungarian is now a supported language.
Great thanks goes to Gabor Funk
German language pack has been updated.
Great thanks to Matthias Waller
35mm Focal Length Multipliers file (cameras.properties) has been updated to include more cameras and models.
Bug Fix: When "folderFooter" is defined in a "meta.properties" file, the footer is now applied to slide pages in addition to index pages.
Reporter: Benjamin
Bug Fix: A rare issue with creating the MySQL database table has been resolved (Viewer Remarks feature).
Great thanks to Jeff for reporting and to Robert for fixing the problem
Bug Fix: An issue with 35mm equivalent focal length calculation, which in some rare cases terminated album generation, has been fixed.
Reporter: Troy

BluPlusPlus 3.5 - April 30, 2005 - Changes since 3.4

Bug Fix: The "Flash" field (photo metadata) is interpreted correctly in numeric mode which was ruined in the previous version.
Reporter: Kaya
Bug Fix: No more warning message on web server when you enable Viewer-Remarks feature.
Reporter: lucnaus

BluPlusPlus 3.4 - April 27, 2005 - Changes since 3.3

Ukrainian, Swedish and Russian are now supported languages.
Great thanks and credits go to Serhij Dubyk, Daniel Hasselqvist and Aleksey Zholdak
The BluPlusPlus "copyright" variable was renamed "albumCopyright" to resolve a conflict with the JAlbum variable with the same name.
Bug Fix: "bpp-generated" has been added to the 'Ignore Pattern' on the JAlbum Advanced tab so that no files in "bpp-generated" folders are processed when 'Output to image directory' is chosen on the JAlbum Main tab.
Bug Fix: Javascript errors no longer occur when keyboard navigation is enabled.
Reporter: Oscar
Bug Fix: Double quotes in image comments are handled correctly.
Reporter: Kevin
Bug Fix: The hyper links from slides to original images are correctly encoded now (if 'URL-encode links' is ON).
Reporter: Alexander Skwar
Bug Fix: The "Flash" field in photo metadata is interpreted correctly.
Reporter: Kaya

BluPlusPlus 3.3 - April 06, 2005 - Changes since 3.2

BluPlusPlus is again runable under Java v1.3.x. Some v1.4 APIs were mistakenly being used in the previous version.
Slovak is now a supported language.
Great thanks to Peter Bachraty
Italian language pack has been updated.
Thank you Marlon for your continuous support
The rendering issues of Frame-Preview are fixed.
The visibility of pages' bottom shadow can now be controlled via the style/theme.

BluPlusPlus 3.2 - March 30, 2005 - Changes since 3.1

URL encoding problem has been resolved. No more plus ("+") sign you'll get on the URLs, which makes them compatible with more servers.
Great thanks to Oliver
Catalan language pack has been updated.
Great thanks to Pere Grau

BluPlusPlus 3.1 - March 16, 2005 - Changes since 3.0

Some minor coding modifications to make the skin compatible with the latest JAlbum (the second release-candidate) changes.
Bug Fix: BPP can be run in Console mode again. Some accessibility issues were causing problems when running in this mode which have been all fixed now.
Bug Fix: The problem has been resolved with selecting the frame types on the user interface.

BluPlusPlus 3.0 - March 04, 2005 - Changes since 2.10

BluPlusPlus now uses a new method of creating frames. Based on XBorderFilter, this allows far greater control over frames than was possible previously. Frame styles can be set separately for slide images, movie images, thumbnails and folder thumbnails. There is a "Preview" action present too. You can see a preview of your selected frame even before creating your albums!
Great thanks and credits go to Jens Troeger and Gordon Dodge for their great contribution and support on this feature
BluPlusPlus now supports a "Viewer Remarks" feature that allows those who view an album to leave remarks about the slide images. This feature requires that albums be accessed from a web server that supports PHP and MySQL. An administrative mode is provided to allow password protected access for remark editing and deletion. This feature is enabled from the "BluPlusPlus-Viewer Remarks" tab.
Credits and great thanks goes to Robert Camner for his outstanding contribution on this feature
Text truncation now permits control over the maximum number of characters that will display at the top path bar and in thumbnail captions. This prevents an "overflow" situation that could ruin the appearance of albums. Text truncation is enabled on the BluPlusPlus-General tab.
Any EXIF or IPTC information can now be displayed for thumbnails as part of their captions or tooltips.
Requester: Pieter Coertzen
The new "Audio Console Dimension" field permits one to specify the exact dimensions desired for the audio player console. (if "Show Audio Console" is enabled of course)
The slide show delay interval can now be set separately for the movies. Added new variable ('slideShowMovieDelay') in this regard with corresponding GUI support.
Norwegian is now a supported language.
Great thanks to P?l R?nningen
Italian language pack has been updated.
Thank you Marlon for your continuous support
The default "ignore pattern" has been changed to exclude the files that begin with '.' or '_', or have extensions ".wav", ".mp3", ".wma", ".voc", ".mid", ".au" and ".rm". They will not be processed as images by BPP.
The BPP user interface has been changed. Two new "Advanced" and "Frames" tabs have been created to cover some of the more advanced features, and the framing related things.
The rarely used 'slideCommentPrefix' and 'slideCommentPostfix' features have been removed from the BluPlusPlus-Slide tab.
For the sake of consistency, the 'Slide Page Thumbnail Ratio' has changed from a decimal to a percent. For example, the default is now "50" (for 50%) rather than "0.5".
Bug Fix: Incorrect image shifting on mouse-over no longer occurs when Context Help is set to 'StatusBar' or 'Both'.
Reporter: Jonathan Cohen
Bug Fix: Embedded HTML tags in the Album Title field are handled correctly.
Reporter: David Clayworth
Colored bands and decorations around images are now referred to as "Frames" (replacing the former term "Borders").

BluPlusPlus 2.10 - January 10, 2005 - Changes since 2.9

A minor modification to run under JAlbum v5.2 as well as the previous versions. There is a minor change in JAlbum v5.2 which makes it incompatible with the previous versions of this skin.
A fix to OutOfMemory problem for the big albums.
Great thanks to Igor Lubashev for his contribution on this part

BluPlusPlus 2.9 - October 23, 2004 - Changes since 2.7

Album processing is significantly faster when "Include Jump-To-Page Facility" is specified on the "BluPlusPlus/General" tab.
Great thanks to Robert Camner and all other guys who kindly helped me to track and fix this issue.
Reporter: Felix
Bug Fix: The "Jump-To-Page" dropdown menu now correctly reflects the customized folder names (set by 'folderTitle' in meta.properties).
Reporter: Chane Cullens
Bug Fix: The navigation button bar is no longer misaligned if "Up Arrow" is the only icon.
Reporter: Alexandru-Tudor Constantinescu
Bug Fix: "External Home Path" behaves correctly when the path starts with "/".
Bug Fix: When "Link to scaled-down images only" is selected, BPP no longer incorrectly generates an "original" slide html page.
Reporter: Scott
Bug Fix: The small "overlay" icons used on index pages to indicate that a thumbnail represents a folder or a movie now display correctly on all platforms and browsers.
Great thanks to Joseph Gan for reporting this issue and contributing the fix for it.
Bug Fix: The pages' layout has been made more compact by the removal of unnecessary reserved space for features not selected for a particular album.
Reporter: Yann
Bug Fix: BPP now works in console mode with online printing service ON.
Support has been added for the "mypix" online printing service.
The generated HTML code is more standards-compliant.
Great thanks to Gorm Vognsen Jensen
It is now possible to specify both the height and width of the movie player window on slide image pages; the dimensions are set on the "BluPlusPlus/Slide" tab. To accomplish this, the 'movieSlideRatio' user variable has been replaced by the 'movieSlideDimension' user variable.
More cameras are supported with the 35mm equivalent lens focal length calculation
French language pack has been updated.
Great thanks to Eric Marcon.
Danish is now a supported language.
Great thanks to Gustav Johnsen

BluPlusPlus 2.7 - August 18, 2004 - Changes since 2.6

The "EXIF Display Mode" drop-down menu on the BluPlusPlus Slide tab has been renamed "Meta-data display mode" and a new option has been added to display only the contents of IPTC fields ("iptc-only"). As well "EXIF Display Fields" is renamed to "Custom Metadata Fields".
Renamed the 'standard' metadata display mode to 'custom'.
Added GUI support for Custom Metadata Fields in BluPlusPlus/Slide tab in order to make it easier for users to customize what appears in the photo metadata information window for "custom" mode.
If a slide image contains only IPTC information and no EXIF information, BPP correctly detects the presence of IPTC information and enables the "i" icon that toggles the display window.
The photographic field display method in "all" and "verbose" modes have been improved a lot both from look&feel and data categorization point of view. Now IPTC and JPEG metadata information are separately detected and displayed.
Users can now create their own tag labels for EXIF/IPTC information display through the use of "texts/photo-metadata.properties" file. Obviously it has internationalization support too (like "texts.properties").
Requester: Gordon Dodge
The focalLengthMultiplier user variable has been removed; the 35mm focal length equivalent is calculated more accurately for both portrait and landscape photos. If enough information does not exist for the calculation, the 35mm equivalent focal length value is calculated based on the constant values contained in the "cameras.properties” file.
Great thanks to Olivier Biot
Czech is now a supported language.
Great thanks to Jan B. Krejci
Bug Fix: The slide page title is correctly set.
Bug Fix: BPP now works correctly if the root of a local drive is specified as the image source directory.
Reporter: Nick A. Carter
Bug Fix: The centimeter unit is correctly considered now when calculating the 35mm equivalent of Focal Length Multiplier for some cameras (such as Fuji).
Reporter: Nick A. Carter
Bug Fix: The folder icons specified within the album are no longer getting ruined in the case the source image and output directories are the same ("Output to image directory" is specified on the JAlbum Main tab).
Reporter: Jesse Lee
Bug Fix: BPP now works correctly in console mode.
Bug Fix: All file names for BPP provided files are now in lowercase; some web servers were having trouble with mixed case files.
Reporter: Robert Camner

BluPlusPlus 2.6 - July 29, 2004 - Changes since 2.5

Version 2.6 requires JAlbum version 4.5 or greater (this allows album generation to speed up considerably).
Incompatibilities introduced by JAlbum 4.5/4.6 have been resolved.
If a custom icon is used for a movie thumbnail, a small icon is added to the thumbnail image so that the viewer can clearly see that the slide will be a movie.
Any EXIF or IPTC information can now be displayed below the slide images as part of the caption.
Requester: Joseph Gan
A title for an album can be optionally specified on the BluPlusPlus-General tab (corresponding "title" variable). This title appears at the topbar and links to the topmost index page as well as the slide and index page titles. If left blank, the album defaults to the name of the album source (input) folder.
Reporter: Lev Gorenstein
The ESC (escape) key has been added as a keyboard shortcut for stopping a slide show in progress.
Unused BPP resources (icon sets, borders, and styles) are no longer copied to the output folder, thus greatly reducing "file bloat".
Requester: Robert Camner, Al Geddis and Gordon Dodge
When a slide image is clicked to show the original image (only effective if "Link to originals via scaled images" is selected on the JAlbum Main tab), the image is shown in an html page, rather than having the image file linked to directly; this permits the disabling of image downloading if save protection is enabled. Also, if save protection is enabled, the "download to disk" icon will be suppressed.
Reporter: Antonie Posthuma
An "original image" slideshow is now possible by clicking on an image to show the original image and then starting a slide show either by the keyboard (using the 's' key) or by the navigation icons. This feature is available only if "Link to originals via scaled images" is selected on the JAlbum Main tab.
If "Link to originals via scaled images" is NOT selected on the JAlbum Main tab, clicking on a slide image will take a viewer to the next slide in the album. This feature, enabled by default, is set via the "Include Move-Forward Facility" checkbox on the BluPlusPlus-Slide tab ('includeMoveForwardFacility' variable). A more handier approach than changing the mouse position and clicking on "next" arrow.
Reporter: Mike and Lev Gorenstein
The "Jump to" menu in the upper right corner of the topbar has been enhanced; it is now possible to go to any "sibling" folder directly. (Note that this works only for "immediate sibling" folders.)
Reporter: Rob, Yevgeny Kazakov, Al Geddis and Gordon Dodge
The slide show delay interval can now be set separately for images with comments and images without comments (to enable viewers to have more time to read comments). Added new variable ('slideShowCommentDelay') in this regard with corresponding GUI support.
Requester: Andre Payant
A new Navigation Tips feature can be enabled on the BluPlusPlus-General tab. If enabled, an icon is placed in the upper right corner of all index and slide image pages; when clicked, a popup box appears giving the viewer a list of navigation keys. The newly added variable ('includeNavigationHelpTips') controls this feature.
Requester: Lev Gorenstein
BluPlusPlus is full XHtml compliant now! :-)
Reporter: Robert Camner and Gordon Dodge
The cookie expiration period for slide shows has been extended to 1 hour for non-cyclic slide shows and 24 hours for cyclic slide shows.
Reporter: Robbie
French is now a supported language.
Great thanks to Jean-Michel for his contribution
Traditional Chinese is now a supported language.
Great thankd to Brian, Ng Chi Ming for his contribution
A "favorite" icon now displays in the viewer's browser URL location box when a BluPlusPlus album is viewed.
Requester: Lev Gorenstein
Bug Fix: The EXIF information box is no longer toggled by a keyboard shortcut (the 'i' key) if a given image has no EXIF information or "EXIF Extraction" is OFF.
Reporter: Robert Camner
Tooltip content set on the BPP-Slide and BPP-Index pages are cleaned up by deleting any embedded HTML tags. The HTML tags were causing problems.
Reporter: Lev Gorenstein
Bug Fix: When using "Random Icons for Folders", the dimension of the chosen icon is correctly calculated.
Great thanks to Igor Lubashev for reporting the bug and sending the fix patch
Bug Fix: The thumbnails on the slide pages are no longer distorted when the FixedShape filter is applied. Instead the maximum thumbnail width and height are considered.
Reporter: Christian Presse
Bug Fix: BPP no longer has difficulty with invalid negative numbers in EXIF information fields.
Reporter: Bob Strand

BluPlusPlus 2.5 - May 30, 2004 - Changes since 2.4

Removed the JDK 1.4 dependencies. Now it's fully runnable under JDK 1.3

BluPlusPlus 2.4 - May 27, 2004 - Changes since 2.3

All JAlbum built-in filters can now be managed by the newly introduced GUI :-) They're all grouped and accessible under 'Filter management' tab.
No more need to manually configure the filters using user variables in the Advanced tab.
Choosing any style/theme will lead you to the user variable default values for that specific style. Currently some default values are defined there for each style so as you change the style, its specific values (such as the border types, icon set and so on) are loaded and affected on GUI. They're all defined in "res/styles/<StyleName>/theme.properties" files and easily can be changed.
Added new 'includeBlendingEffectOnSlides' and 'includeBlendingEffectOnIndexes' variables to control whether or not to include the blending effects on slide and index pages. Also added GUI support for better managing the stuffs (See Index and Slide tabs).
Added new 'slideCaptionContent' variable for controlling the exact slide information you want to see on each slide page (at the bottom of the slide). GUI support is provided at Slide tab.
Added new 'cyclicSlideShow' user variable for controlling whether to include cyclic Slide Show or not. GUI support is provided at Slide tab.
Added new 'contextHelpStyle' user variable (with corresponding GUI support on General tab) to control the context help style using in album. The default is 'ToolTip' but you can specify to show the context help in 'StatusBar' or the 'Both'.
Added new 'navigationBarVerticalLocation' user variable (with corresponding GUI support on General tab) to control the navigation bar vertical location in album. The default is 'Top' but you can specify to show it at the 'Bottom' or the 'Both'.
Variable 'thumbnailNoteContent' renamed to 'thumbnailCaptionContent' as well as 'folderNoteContent' to 'folderCaptionContent' for better reflecting the goals!
Added new border types:
bracket_black, bracket_horizontal_black, bracket_vertical_black, bracket_white, bracket_horizontal_white, bracket_vertical_white, shadow_artsy, shadow_autumn, shadow_christmas, shadow_expedition, shadow_gray, shadow_hakki, shadow_dark
Contributed by: Georg (Shorshe) & Gordon Dodge
Added 2 new icon sets: black & white
Contributed by: Georg (Shorshe)
Added "White" album theme/style suitable in combination with the new "black" icon set
Added many new "top-bar" graphics to "res/topbars". All in per-style basis. You can change the defaults by editing the styles (CSS files) and point to whatever topbar you want.
No more vertical scrollbar on pages when it's not needed!
Bug Fix: The movies and sound annotations are copied regardless of what the "Copy Originals" status is, because they're all needed in any case!
Bug Fix: The movies are copied into "slides" folder instead of the root to avoid any problem with Windows Media Player (it does not play the media files outside of the current folder!).
Bug Fix: The movie thumbnails were not shown with the right aspect ratio on slide page, when the .thumb image for movie is specified.
Great thanks to Yevgeny Kazakov for reporting and fixing this bug.
Bug Fix: If the Slide Ratio was set to any value other than the default 0.5, the columns with the slide thumbnails were horizontally aligned to the left in rather than center as intended.
Great thanks to Yevgeny Kazakov for reporting and fixing this bug.
Bug Fix: The FixedShape filter is now treated correctly.
Reporter: Joseph Gan
Bug Fix: The sibling slides preloading/prefetching works now if "Link To Originals" is selected.
Reported & Fixed By: Mark Fyvie

BluPlusPlus 2.3 - March 08, 2004 - Changes since 2.2

Added new slide prefetch facility. You can control whether or not to prefetch the sibling slides of the current one using 'prefetchSiblingSlides' variable.
The amount of information displayed on index pages for both the slide and folder thumbnails are fully customizable now using the newly introduced 'thumbnailNoteContent' and 'folderNoteContent' variables. A long awaited and greatly voted feature!
Reporter: David Hart
Scrollbar styles (colors actually) are back again :-)
Really great thanks to Mike for coming up a good solution for this long lasting bug!
Fixed the movie thumbnail size calculation bug!
The padding and margins of the styles changed a bit to look better on Opera browser too. The pages were containing some spaces around. Fixed now!
Added Brazilian-Portuguese translation support.
Brilliant thanks go to Ricardo Pescuma Domenecci for his great job.
'actionType' variable renamed to 'iconSet' for better reflecting its real usage.
Fixed a javascript bug on Shutterfly.com order printing service.
Thanks to David Hart for reporting and fixing this bug.
A scripting bug-fix on 'albumfiles.txt' when it was containing different photos from different folders.

BluPlusPlus 2.2 - February 04, 2004 - Changes since 2.1

Movies are handled/played correctly on different platforms and different browsers.
Thanks to Robert Camner, Gordon Dodge and Al Geddis for bringing up this issue and fixing the problem :-)
Slide and index background background sounds are now handled way better and working just fine on different platforms and different browsers.
Thank you Robert & Gordon for your active contributions.
Added 'showAudioConsole' user variable to control the display of background voice annotations' console.
Russian translation added.
Great thanks to Yevgeny Kazakov.
Polish translation added.
Great thanks to Pawel Piskunowicz.
Added support for Shutterfly.com online printing service. This is controlled via 'shutterflyPrintingSupport' variable (can also be set via the GUI).
Added new variable ('includeSaveProtection') for controlling whether or not to protect the album images from being saved via right-click or context-menu.
Great thanks to Nachtzuster for contributing on this feature.
Added new variable ('movieSlideRatio') for controlling the size of the movie slides.
Added 'SlideDimension' as a new attribute for customizing slide thumbnails' tooltip content. Previously supported 'Dimension' attribute leads you to the original file dimension not the slide.
'includeExternalHomeInPath' variable is not used anymore and instead a new and more flexible variable ('externalHomePath') is introduced!
You can exactly control the external home path by this variable and it's no more hardcoded to just one level upper!
Thanks to Robert Camner for raising up this issue for having more control.
Choosing random icons for the folders is really done in random order now rather than just choosing the first image constantly.
Thanks to Ricardo Pescuma Domenecci for his code contribution.
Blend-Effect on slide pages is back there working fine ;-)
Great thanks to Ricardo Pescuma Domenecci for tracking the problem and contributing a solution for.
The folder icons outside the albums are treated correctly now. They're copied inside the album to keep the consistency.
Reporter: Igor Lubashev
The long paths do not blow out the entire top path bar anymore! Instead the page will get a horizontal scrollbar to cover the whole.
Fixed the problem caused by slideshow play/pause actions when the pages were downloaded with slow connections (bad layout effect because the play or pause buttons were inserted later by JS).
The default action type changed from 'bright-matte' to 'universal' to fit the best with the rest of environment and styles. 'bright-matte' has been mostly designed for bright backgrounds as its name suggests!
Improved GUI to automatically detected the available languages, action and border types. They're no more hard-coded! You can easily add your own types in proper directories and BPP will automatically detect and show them on GUI.
Thanks to Yevgeny Kazakov for raising up this idea :-)
Added "About..." tab to skin GUI with a list of important links for quick access to resources.
Some minor bug fixes and improvements.

BluPlusPlus 2.1 - December 17, 2003 - Changes since 2.0

Improved GUI to better manage the things. Now all the controls are visible on screen :-)
Reporter: Burt G.
Updated Italian translation.
Thanks to Marlon.
The original image is no more opened in the same windows as the slide is. It has its own window now!
Reporter: Peter Bijkerk
Encoding is no more fetched from language pack. Instead it's got from JAlbum itself (more consitency as well as covering a bug).
Added GUI support for selecting the album generation language. No more manual setting is needed!
Defining an invalid folder icon path is no more flawing the whole album generation but handles it by informing the user of. Also invalid slide or index background image path will lead to a warning.
Reporter: Robert Camner

BluPlusPlus 2.0 - December 14, 2003 - Changes since 1.11

BPP has got its own GUI for doing most of the skin customizations :-) It's far easier and simpler now to customize your favorite skin! Thus the minimum JAlbum version, to run BPP under, will be v4.1.
Great thanks to David Ekholm for adding GUI support.
Added per-folder user variable control :-) All of the album level user variables can be overriden for any of the album folders and their subfolders (via "variables.properties" meta file which can be placed within any folder).
Added per-folder theme/style! Each folder can have its own theme/style by specifying "style" variable in variables.properties (e.g. style=Bluish.css). Now you can easily use different themes for each of your sub-albums :-) Not specifying anything for a folder will lead to the default style, user has chosen on JAlbum's "Main" tab.
Added many new styles/themes such as Arcs, Artsy, Autumn, Canvas, Christmas, Expedition, Glacier, Gray & Hakki.
Great thanks to Yevgeny Kazakov & David Hart for contributing on this part.
Added Spanish, Catalan and Dutch languages support.
Brilliant thanks go to Manel Rodero and Peter Bijkerk for their contributions.
Added voice annotation support for folders. They will be played on the first index page of the folder. Please refer to UserGuide.txt for more
information on usage.
Thank you Marlon for bringing up this issue.
Added background image support for folders. They will be displayed on the index and slides pages of the folder. Please refer to UserGuide.txt
for more information on usage.
Thank you Marlon for bringing up this issue.
Added 3 new variables to control the folder thumbnail border attributes separately as many users had requested this feature :-). 'folderThumbnailBorderType' for the type, 'folderThumbnailBorderSize' as for size and 'folderThumbnailBorderColor' to control the color.
All of them are optional and not defining them will cause the skin to use the slide thumbnail borders attributes for folders too.
The dimension of the thumbnails on slide pages can now be separately controlled via the newly introduced 'slidePageThumbnailRatio' variable which is calculated against index page thumbnails' size.
Reporter: Igor Lubashev
Thumbnail labels on index pages no more collide when they're too long.
Added a hack to overcome the problem while 'chooseRandomIconForFolder' is "true" and the randomly chosen icon is in GIF format. JAlbum was
converting the slide and thumbnail images to JPG and caused inconsistency problems (BPP was refering to GIF while the actual file was in JPG).
Repoter: Bob
Fixed the slide pages' thumbnail distance from the screen edge.
Reporter: Robert Camner
Customizations of the album root folder's title (via meta.properties) are considered now if there are any.
Reporter: Yevgeny Kazakov
The scaled down icons for the folders (those directly selected or chosen via the Random method) are preserving correct aspect ratio.
Brilliant thanks to Igor Lubashev & Yevgeny Kazakov for reporting this bug and contributing the patch.
The specified folder icons are no more copied blindly IF there are thumbnails generated for them. The thumbnails will be used instead to
decrease the album size and more important the download size.
Great thanks to Yevgeny Kazakov & Igor Lubashev for their ideas/solutions on how to fix this flaw.
The texts of the thumbnails on index pages are in bold to be more eye-catching!
Thanks to Igor Lubashev for bringing up this issue.
The drop shadow at the bottom of the pages is no more looking bad when using it with different themes (background colors). The shadow is dynamically generated at runtime (JS) so is easily adapted with different background colors without having to have different resources for each.
The key assigned for going to index (from slide pages) or one level upper (while you're viewing an index), has been changed from "Up Arrow" to
"Page Up" for better navigation (as "Up Arrow" is used for scrolling the page itself).
Fixed the wrong generated table tags for EXIF Information (caused problems if the browser were a bit picky!) as well as some XML style tag formats in HTML and missing TYPE attribute of <SCRIPT> blocks.
Great thanks go to Greg Kolanek for reporting these flaws.

IMPORTANT RELEASE NOTES (The following changes are for making all the variable names consistent):

All the boolean like variables (with yes/no values) have been converted to real booleans. So from now on, BPP is accepting "true" and "false"
values for those variables!
All the variables with "Exclude" postfix have been renamed to "Include" and the "Exclude*" variables are deprecated now. So the "true" value for
these variables will mean "Okay! Include The Feature" from now on! This is just for simplifying the stuffs as it's easier to think of "true" for "OKAY! Include" and "false" for "Do NOT Include".
All variables start with lower case now!
All the variables with underscore ("_") in their names have been renamed to remove the underscore.

BluPlusPlus 1.11 - November 12, 2003 - Changes since 1.10

Added keyboard navigation support for slide and index pages. This can be controlled by the newly introduced variable 'ExcludeKeyboardSupport'. Please refer to UserGuide.txt for key mappings.
Special brilliant thanks go to "Dan Stefanescu" for contributing this feature.
Added German language support :-)
Great thanks go to "Henning Waltemathe" for the contribution.
Added 3 new variables to control the thumbnail border attributes separately. 'ThumbnailBorderType' for the type, ThumbnailBorderSize as for size and ThumbnailBorderColor' to control the color. All of them are optional and not defining them will cause the skin to use the slide borders attributes for thumbnails too.
Reporter: Robert Camner
Added new border type ('black-frame') which fits better on 'Black' theme/style. Contributed by David Hart. Great thanks for his effort.
Bug-fix on bad index page layout when the folders had got BIG customized icon via "meta.properties".
Reporter: Nick A. Carter
Bug-fix on cell sizes of thumbnails on index pages. They were not calculated correctly, leading to a not so suitable layout.
Folder titles in index pages are all aligned in one row.
Jump-To-Page combobox is no more get included if there are only one page (even if 'ExcludeJumpToPageAction' variable is "no")!
Reporter: Marlon
Original image download icon (on slides) is not displayed when there isn't any original image (When "Link to scaled-down images only" option
is selected).
Reporter: Marlon

BluPlusPlus 1.10 - November 09, 2003 - Changes since 1.9

Added support for WMA sound/voice annotation format.
Fixed the index pages column alignments (especially in the cases when there are not so many columns).
Fixed the play icon bug in IE. There was a '_' sign at the bottom right corner when the icon was hovered. Great thanks to "Dan Stefanescu" for fixing this bug.

BluPlusPlus 1.9 - November 09, 2003 - Changes since 1.7

Upgraded the minimum requirement of BluPlusPlus to JAlbum v4.0.1 because of a bug for "External Home" link inclusion, "Jump To Page" bug fix which needed some of the v4.0.1 APIs. By having "Jump To Page" action OFF, you can also use v3.5 as the minimum.
Disabled icons' (actions') tooltips are correctly displayed on Mozilla (bug-fix).
"Jump To Page" combo-box on slide pages is now correctly filled with the right slide URLs (bug-fix). Moreover, in some cases, the bug was causing ArrayIndexOutOfBoundException while generating the album.
Reporter: Peter Bijkerk
Top bar folders/paths links are fixed to point into the first index page on the current folder (both for index and slide pages).
Reporter: Al Geddis
There was a bug on when the file/folder name was too long to fit in one row (on index pages). The alignment of the corresponding thumbnail was not correct (it was some pixels upper). It's fixed now!
Reporter: Robert Camner
Fixed the navigation icons vertical position on slide pages. They were right up against the blue bar. Now they're a bit lower in order not to
bleed into the top bar.
Reporter: Robert Camner
Corrected the spelling of 'EXIF_Fields' variable (it was wrongly spelled as 'EXIF_Fileds'). But for keeping the backward compatibility both the correct and incorrect spellings are checked.
Reporter: Robert Camner
'Exclude_FirstLastPage_Actions' variable now has the same effect on the index pages as for the slides (to exclude the first/last page/slide
actions).
BluPlusPlus is internationalized now! And Italian has been added as the first officially supported non-English language (texts available in
"texts_en.properties" and "texts_it.properties" files).
Brilliant thanks to Marlon for bringing up this issue and contributing on Italian translation :-)
Tooltip contents for the folder thumbnails as well as the slide ones are fully customizable now by 'ThumbnailTooltipContent' and 'FolderTooltipContent' user variables.
Thanks to Marlon for bringing up this issue.
If user does not enter any number for 'FocalLengthMultiplier' variable (or enter zero or another invalid number), the skin will automatically
calculate this factor for each slide, based on EXIF meta data.
Thanks to 'Lykle' for sharing his code on this part.
Total slides count are displayed at the top bar of the index pages.
Multiline slide comments, or having both embedded and external slide comments, are aligned better along with the comment prefix and postfix
(bug-fix).
Reporter: Al Geddis
Thumbnail tooltips are displayed on older browsers too (e.g. NS 4.xx).
Reporter: Al Geddis
Movie support added for WMV format. Now they're correctly linked from index to slide pages and played fine too.
Reporter: Al Geddis
The first, last, next and previous actions title have been improved at the slide and index pages to better indicate the situation.
Reporter: Marlon
Added a new theme/style ('Black').
Thanks to Robert Camner for his contribution on this part.
Three new user variables have been introduced ('BorderType', 'BorderSize' and 'BorderColor') to control the look&feel of the slide and thumbnail borders. Four different border types are being supported now :-) The default one (shadow), Exhibit-like frame, solid color-based border and no border type. More can be added easily!
Thanks to Robert Camner for bringing up the idea. This is greatly based on Robert's idea and his sample implementation.
Added `ActionType' Variable to control the actions icon type. And two new icon sets are introduced. One set ('dark-matte') is optimized for dark backgrounds such as the new 'Black' theme and the another one ('universal') is background independent.
Great thanks go to Robert Camner for his contribution on this part :-)
A disabled EXIF icon is displayed whenever there isn't any EXIF information available for the slide, for keeping the consistency so that the various navigation icons line up better from slide to slide. BUT if you turn off the "Photography Data Extraction" option on "Advanced" tab of JAlbum, no EXIF action/icon will be included at all.
Thank you Robert & Marlon for the idea and bringing up this issue.

BluPlusPlus 1.7 - October 23, 2003 - Changes since 1.6

BugFix on top bar path links (they were all pointing to an invalid address at the index pages).
Fixed the problem (ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException) that zero-length text files (image comments, titles and other text files) were causing due to a bug in JAlbum's readTextFile() API. Thanks to Marlon for reporting this.
Finally slides comment horizontal alignments and vertical positions are fully customizable now via 'SlideCommentHorizontalAlign' and 'SlideCommentVerticalPosition' user variables. Many users have requested this feature. Hope this can make all of them happy :-)
Slides comment prefix (the word "Comment:" in black) is no more hard-coded and user can control this value via 'SlideCommentPrefix' variable. Also a new possibility added to have postfixes for the slides' comments and is controlled via 'SlideCommentPostfix' variable. These two variables are useful when you want to enclose the whole comment inside an HTML tag or so.
All the PNG icons converted to transparent GIF format for better compatibility with all the browsers (as GIF transparency is supported far better even on newer browsers too!) - Thanks to Marlon & David Hart for bringing up this thread/issue.
All the navigation icons (except the UP one) are a bit smaller now (27x27) to have more focus on the slide image itself rather than the bells and whistles - Thanks David for mentioning this small but important issue.
New folder icon :-) It's beautiful and I like it!
Added a new user variable called 'ChooseRandomIconForFolder' for controlling whether or not to automatically choose a random image from the image containing folders as folder icon IF there isn't any specific icon defined by 'folderIcon' in meta.properties. Setting the value to "no" will cause the standard folder icon to get chosen IF no specific icon is defined.
If an image other than the original one is specified for a folder (via folderIcon in meta.properties) or a random image is selected, a mini folder icon is appended to that image to indicate that it's a folder not an ordinary image. Thanks to Nick A. Carter for the code contribution :-)
You can specify to include the link of your album containing home/parent directory at the top bar. And this can be controlled via 'IncludeExternalHomeInPath' variable. This is useful when you have several separately generated albums all in one folder and want to be able to traverse among them. Thanks to Al Geddis for bringing up this issue :-)

BluPlusPlus 1.6 - October 12, 2003 - Changes since 1.5

Per-folder metadata is getting supported via "meta.properties" inside each folder :-) You can specify the title, header, footer and icon of the folders as well as the titles and descriptions of their containing files. Please refer to "Usage Tips" section in ReadMe.txt to see the details.
More information provided on thumbnail tooltips. You get image size, dimensions and comment if presents.
Movies are no more directly referenced at index pages and slides' side bar thumbnails. Instead a file with naming convention like "moviefilename.ext.thumb" will be looked up at the same movie file contained directory. If presents, it will be used as thumbnail for the movie otherwise the standard movie icon will be picked!
Fixed the hyperlinks color in the included headers and footers was so that they are quite readable now! Thanks to Al Geddis for reporting this bug.
A minor bug fix (on a script error) when "Copy original images" option was not set.
Thumbnail shadows are now lesser than the slide shadows for having a more beautiful and miniature view of them. Great thanks to Valentino Ciciarelli for the code contribution :-)
Improved the top navigation bar. The image & page numbers are displayed at right side of the screen giving it a far better look and more readable view. Thanks again to Valentino Ciciarelli for the contribution.
No more bad layout (messed up navigation buttons) on slide pages when the images are small! Credit goes to Valentino Ciciarelli.
New "copyright" user variable added to include your own copyright note at the bottom of all the index and slide pages. Great thanks go to Nick A. Carter for the code contribution.
[For Developers Only] All the beanshell & java scripts have been migrated (while refactored) and centralized to common.bsh, slide.bsh, slide.js & index.bsh files for better maintenance! ".htt" files are no more containing any scripts!

BluPlusPlus 1.5 - September 30, 2003 - Changes since 1.4

Movie support added for AVI, MOV and MPEG formats on both index and slide pages.
More voice annotation formats are supported (MP3, MID and VOC).
Voice annotated images are marked in index pages so they can get easily distinguished.
Picture/Movie/Folder names on index pages are hyperlink now.
Comment line on slide pages is removed totally to free more space IF there isn't any comment for the current slide.
Minor cosmetic change on EXIF display Look&Feel.
'ExcludeSlideShow' variable added to control the inclusion of Slide Show facility of slide pages. This can be useful if your browser does not have a good JavaScript support to use Slide Show feature.

BluPlusPlus 1.4 - September 19, 2003 - Changes since 1.3

Added next & previous N (which can be controlled) thumbnails to each slide page to simplify the navigation which enables you to do long jumps without leaving the slide. You have the option to define the number of thumbnails to include (via 'SlidePageThumbnailCount' variable) as well as to turn the feature totally off (controlled by 'ExcludeSlidePageThumbnails').
Added new quick page navigation actions. On each index and slide page, there is a quick page accessor within the current image directory that you can easily 'Jump' to any index page you want. This can help a lot for navigation on big directories. As usual, it can be controlled by 'ExcludeJumpToPageAction' variable.
Used the "»" unicode-specifier instead of the ">>" character in the title bar so that the output be more portable (as of JAlbum v3.6, it's supporting unicode)
Footer comments and copyright information are now displayed correctly on older browsers too (line-breaks are kept now).
Slide page actions are aligned to center on old browsers too (they were left aligned).
Blue strip of the top bar and bottom shadow of the pages are now fixed to work on the older browsers correctly (they were not displayed at all).

BluPlusPlus 1.3 - September 14, 2003 - Changes since 1.2

Shaddow of the thumbnails trimmed a few pixels to allow more on a row (better use of screen space). The default layout is 6x3 now - Thank you Markus
Added new navigation buttons for directly going to the first and last pages of an image set (both on index and slide views). The buttons' insertion in slide pages can be controlled via 'Exclude_FirstLastPage_Actions' variable (yes/no). So that if you want a simpler layout with less actions, you can exclude them.
Added description to the actions (as tooltip).
File/Image 'date' moved to bottom of the image (slides), beside the image name, to free more space at the top.
Image sizes are displayed in KB for less than 1MB and in MB for more than 1MB files
The album last modification date is inserted at the bottom of each page
Setting transparency color for a few of the icons - Thanks to Marlon for mentioning
Text colors of current style/theme (Bluish) are now a bit improved to be more readable
Added new style/theme (Bluish2). The title bar text colors are in yellow to be more and more readable on older browsers (NS 4.x and so). The comments and other informations are in a blue consistence with the overall look&feel - Thank you Marlon for the idea :-)

BluPlusPlus 1.2 - September 01, 2003 - Changes since 1.1

Voice annotations can be added to the images.
Added more actions the viewer can do, to the bottom of each image slide page. One for downloading the original image and another for accessing to the voice annotation if there is any.

BluPlusPlus 1.1 - August 29, 2003 - Changes since 1.0

The overall background color of the index and slide pages changed to make them more consistence with the theme.
Folder & Movie icons are now transparent.
Preview screenshot added!

BluPlusPlus 1.0 - July 29, 2003

Initial Release! No Changes!! ;-)