Most of the update is done. We still have some issues that have to be resolved in order for us to release all goodies. What goodies? One of them is better facebook integration, the other is an Expono Downloader application for Windows, Mac, and Linux. We aim to release it as beta tomorrow on getsatisfaction. If all goes well, it will be released as non-beta within a week.
Why did it take so long for you to release an update?
Well, 2.5 months is not THAT long, but it’s longer than we want it to be. We did some heavy architectural changes, which will improve things for us in the future. However, we are going to aim at pushing a new release monthly. We are also going to “Open Up” the development process much more than before. So you know what’s coming and have the power to influence priorities. More about that in a separate blog post.
Why did this “maintenace” take several hours?
This was not only a software update, but we hade a complete server overhaul. New servers, with new updated operating system and software. New environments, updated configurations. Added support for SSL certificates (Finally!). We ran some heavy database upgrade scripts. The database upgrade itself took 2 hours. Converting million of activities. We did prepare and test a lot of stuff on our test environment, but some things just had to be tested on the production environment.
So what’s new?
We now have over 500,000 identities in the database. Identities? That’s people who have access to view custom privacy photos. People who are friends, family or colleagues to our users. These people can now comment, rate, and favorite photos without having to signup. That means, that we have converted all comments, ratings, and favorites to use identities instead of users_ids. The same way that Photo Privacy (ACL) works today. There is a lot of technical mumbo jumbo behind this, but what it really means is that Expono gets much better for you as a user. When you share and albums or photos to friends, you want them to have to possiblity comment without having them to commit to something like signing up etc. Removing these obstacles and annoying things will make the service much better. Also, the work around identities opens up for some really nice things to come, such as custom privacy sharing to Facebook and Twitter. When do you plan to fix that? It’s already in progress.
Translation & Localization
Thanks a lot to all our translators who does an excellent job at making sure the translations are up to date. The latest language to be production “complete” is Simplified Chinese. Thanks to Hong Shen!
ChangeLog Expono v0.9.2-4364
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed buggy uploader for certain translations
- Fixed missing width and height in new templates
- Fixed photos taken date earlier then 1970 makes photo inaccessible.
- Can’t edit titles in “detailed” mode if no title already exists. Now fixed.
- Fixed Share to Facebook “small whitebox with close button” issue
- And lots more…
Improved Features:
- New Footer. Easier to find pages.
- Translation page and guidelines improved. Translator credits! Thank you everyone!
- Album Title is bigger and have better contrast. No breadcrumb.
- Shared albums and photos improved. Better views. Signup to comments etc no longer required.
New Features:
- Single Sign-On from Facebook, Google, Windows Live ID, Twitter, Flickr
- Comments doesn’t require signup. Comments support identities.
- Favorites doesn’t require signup. Favorites support identities.
- Ratings doesn’t require signup. Ratings support identities.
- Identities (viewers / non-registered expono users) have their own activities and profiles.
- New Language: Simplified Chinese! Thanks to Hong Shen!
- The Wall. Simply a wall of square images for you to explore.
- Twitter OAuth support implemented.
- Gravatar images automatically fetched during signup.
- You can now have your Friendfeed feed on your user page
- Explore public activities such as photos, albums, people, comments, tags
Expono API Updates:
- expono.photosets.create: If no privacy parameter was supplied we used the user default album privacy, but it will from now on be private. We will introduce a new parameter in future update for this e .g “use_default” that will be used for uploads aswell.
- Fixed error that wouldn’t validate OAuth requests that used Authorization header for oauth parameters.
- oauth_callback to custom URL schemes will now work, useful for e.g iPhone Apps.
- JSON format added as optional response format.
- Empty fields e.g description wont return a whitespace character anymore
- expono.photos.getInfo, comment count is now shown even if count is 0
- expono.people.getUploadStatus, no more negative values for storage/bandwith remaining (999999999 is used for people with unlimited)
- More info about the JSON format can be found here
