Mar 12

Update #22 – Added Irish, Danish and Dutch!

By Magnus Development, Release Notes View Comments

To keep you informed and up-to-date with new features, enhancements and bug fixes, we have decided to post all release notes for ALL our updates, including minor releases, on the blog in the future.

Planned Maintenace Day
We would also like to announce that our official maintenance day is every first Tuesday in the month between 01:00am-03:00am CEST. During this time, Expono.com, may become unavailable depending on the type of maintenance.

2010-03-10 (v0.9.3-4507)

New Features:

  • Danish translation added (100%) Thanks to Nanker and marte_ms.
  • Irish translation added (70% done). Thanks to Seanan.
  • Dutch translation added (70% done). Thanks to Yentl, Biite, and Heureka.
  • Software page added.
  • Downloader 1.0 released!

Enhancements:

  • Improved the Swedish translation.
  • Added three additional thumbnail sizes to the Media RSS Feed

Bugfixes:

  • Fixed the issue where untagging oneself removed the option of retagging oneself
  • Fixed design/layout issues in the “Detailed” layout
  • Fixed several HTML bugs

Known Issues
We experienced some problems with Internet Explorer and SSL after the update. If you see anything abnormal, please let us so know.

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Jan 14

New Languages added Swedish and Traditional Chinese!

By Magnus Release Notes View Comments

We are starting off the year by adding two new languages to Expono: Swedish and Traditional Chinese. This update includes two important ground work features, such as the background task handler and improved statistics collection.

ChangeLog Expono v0.9.3-4450

New Features:

  • Swedish translation added. Thanks to 3rd!
  • Traditional Chinese translation added. Thanks to Dashuai and Jingjing!
  • Improved statistics collection. Photo views now stores referal links and sites linking in.
  • Background Task Handler. Important groundwork for features to come. Starting with service sync.

Enhancements:

  • Album Edit Menu is now visible under ALL layouts.
  • Album privacy moved to the edit menu and visible under ALL layouts.
  • Unified the UI in Settings, Profile, Services for consistency.
  • Added background processing of contact updates. Can now handle updates of thousands. Speedier response.
  • Photo title in the detailed view is now easier to read.
  • Re-added features on frontpage to improve SEO.

Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed IE UI Bugs. Missing buttons in the tab menu.
  • Fixed comments notifications. It now works as intended.
  • Fixed so Add To Stack works in all available layouts.
  • Fixed so Slideshow works in all available layouts.
  • Fixed so “My Comments” displays all your comments.
  • Fixed bugs with contacts updates from third-party services.
  • Removed AddThis share button. It confuses users, and can cause buggy behaviour. Use
    standard share instead.
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Dec 02

December Update. What's new?

By Magnus Announcements, Release Notes View Comments

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
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Mar 04

Recent updates on expono.com

By Magnus Development, Release Notes View Comments

Update #11 (2009-03-03)

Useful updates and bug-fixes contain static URL for embedded albums. Which we recommend everybody to update in their albums.

You’ll be happy to know that the character encoding is fixed, so that e-mail subjects now appear correctly.

The system now ignores people without valid e-mail addresses, so photos and albums are not shared to anyone without an e-mail address.


- Static URL fixed for embed-able albums. Please, update your album embed code!
- Fixed character encoding issues in email subjects.
- Shared Items are no longer created for people without a valid email address.
- Layout fixes on share header for Internet Explorer users.
- Settings privacy fixed between new users and users who invited them.
- Fixes issues with email being exposed to followers.
- Changing your primary email now only send alerts to mutual connections (no followers).
- Error while trying to create groups in "Add To Group" dialog has been fixed.
- Photo owners not being able to delete comments from other users. Fixed.
- Sorting by Photo Taken in the Album Editor has been fixed.
- Photo Activities are now forwarded to email by default.
- Announcements are now forwarded to email by default.

Update #10 (2009-02-06)

Updates and bug-fixes help expono products and services grow better, and a continuos feedback from our users is essential to make sure we keep the highest standards and cater to the needs of our users. Please make sure to use the feedback system, which black TAB, you can see on the right side of every expono.com page.

One thing is to send out invitations to friends and family and have them enjoy your photo albums safely here at expono.com, another and sometimes more useful ability is to publish your photos and albums in a blog or a web site where you already have followers and readers.

The new embed-able album code, found in your public album pages, enables your followers to see your albums and to start slideshows from within your blog or web site.

Find what you are looking for. Now searching public photos, photos of you, your own photos, albums, and favorites can now all be searched for in one unified search field.

A great new feature is the ability to show in a map where every one of your photos are geographically shot. Expono can make use of the GPS location stored in the photo’s EXIF data, if available, and expono also enables users to enter places manually.

If you have different groups of people who should see different albums, this is made easier for you to manage. In the address book, a groups tab is now placed on the left of your contacts. Click a group to see members or add a new group.

- New Feedback system. Join us at GetSatisfaction.com to make Expono a better place for you photos.
- Embeddable Album Photo Slide
- Simplified Uploader. Upload directly to albums
- Unified Search. You can now search your photos, album, favorites, photos of you, and all public photos on Expono.
- Unified Menu and Terminology.
- Introduces Places. A world map where you and your friens can browse photos based on location.
- Improved Create Album. Simplified UI.
- You can now create new groups directly from the sidebar in the addressbook

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Oct 24

An update on updates

By Magnus Development View Comments

Hi

It’s been a little bit quiet on the blog the last couple of weeks, and that is because we have been cranking code and working long hours to fix bugs, and features requested by you :)

We are doing an additional update on the site today (which totals over 50 bugfixes since Update #3). We wanted to make sure stuff are stable before we dive into the massive rewrite of our current privacy settings and finish the work on sharing and invites. The new privacy give the you flexibility to have a much more detailed control over who have access to see your photos. We are introducing custom groups, passwords and time limited urls on both album level and individual photo level.

I would like to give you a summary of what has been done in the last 3 updates during the last 4 weeks since we launched our closed private beta:

Update #3 – Smarter Batch Editing and Rotation is here!
2008-10-14 (v0.8.4-2102)

- Manual Rotation is now available under the “More Option” menu on your photo pages
- Greater control in “Edit Photos”. You can now explicit select/deselect the photos you want edit.
- Recent photos tagged of you is now displayed on the dashboard in addition to new photos uploaded by your friends
- Restore Thumbnails. If you have broken photos today you can use this function to restore all thumbnails so they match your original uploaded photo.
- Now you can view all comments made on your photos in the album page!
- Delete or Edit contacts from the Address Book
- Album Search. It is now possible to search through your albums using titles, description or year.
- You now have the choice to apply index numbers to titles when changing the title on multiple photos.
- Improvements to all RSS feeds. You can now choose between 3 types of RSS.

  1. New photos by Expono Users
  2. New photos by A User
  3. Photos in a specific album

- You can now delete, or mark as read, multiple messages at once from your Inbox
- New filter in the photos tab to list photos not in an album
- Lightview (in fullscreen album view) now displays all photos in the album, not only the photos per page.
- Photo description is now available in the slideshow (lightview).
- Popular tags now lists up to 1000 tags!
- It’s now possible to add up to 100 photos with a specific tag to your stack
- You can now add a contact to your address book by clicking on “Add as new” when tagging, if he/she doesn’t show in the autocompleter
- You can now search photos in “Create Album”. – And a bunch of minor bugfixes and enhancements

Update #2 – New Feedback System and lots more
2008-10-03 (v0.8.2-2000)

- New Photos on the dashboard. A much better way to see new photos uploaded by your connections.
- Friends of friends is now conveniently listed on the dashboard, maybe you will find people you know but is not connected with?
- Old feedback system has been replaced by a much better and easier system. Try it!
- Writing a comment on another user’s photo notifies everyone who has commented on the photo before you. This way everybody can join the conversation!
- Now you can change your contacts name and email in your Address Book.
- You can now create an album directly from the photos in a stack
- “Changed Password” has moved from “Your Account” to “Your Profile”
- When you send a connection request to a friend, he/she is automatically added to your Address Book, so now you can start tagging your friends on your photos right away.
- Safari fixes in the album creator. Sorting now works for Safari users.
- Sort order of photos in “Edit Photos” has been fixed.
- It’s now possible to location tag a whole stack of photos without overwriting existing locations, but only photos without one.
- Uploaded photos with GPS data where location lookups fails against geonames are still location tagged, but with coordinates instead of a know location.
- Links/URL are now made clickable in messages
- The RSS feeds now provides photos with a higher resolution
- It’s now possible to list more than 25 connections
- Optimizations to the search indexing
- It’s now possible to browse photos of a tagged person
- Dashboard’s “Let’s get it started” links which has been done are automatically removed next time you login.
- Double clicking a photo in the album creator now set it as cover photo for the album
- Invited users are no longer automatically connected with the person who invited them as friends.
- The user badge now has a direct link to all comments made by a user

Update #1 – Improvements to the uploader
2008-09-30 (v0.8.2-1953)

- Improvements to the uploader (backend and logging)
- Pausing and resuming should now work as expected
- Connection request buttons in your inbox now show correctly action
- Time zones in your profile now shows correct GMT time difference
- Now you can see older activities for made by You and by Others
- Improved the layout of albums in your Inbox
- The layout of your Address Book and your People tab has been fixed for Opera users
- You can also enjoy alphabetically ordered Tag suggestions
- The Fullscreen Album view now works as planned :)
- UI fixes for users running Firefox version 2
- Logout link is now available in the upper right corner next to the search box.
- Internal adjustments in system logging

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