I want to talk about InstantGallery 2 a little bit today in case you might be thinking it’s been forgotten. I’m sorry to say I’m still hard at work on it as I really wanted it to be in your hands by now. It’s just proving a much larger endeavour than I ever expected it to be. Getting FTP publishing implemented is proving particularly troublesome due to a lack of documentation and limited framework choices*. InstantGallery 2 has a pretty advanced CSS editor built in, the aforementioned FTP and a radically overhauled gallery creation mechanism, it’s practically three products in one. Aside from the technical challenge of engineering all these components there is also the challenge of integrating them in a seamless way that remains true to the original goals of InstantGallery. That is to allow you to just dump some pictures into it and immediately have something presentable and ready to upload. Balancing that ideal and ease of use while growing the application massively is obviously tricky. The extended time period it’s taking to get IG2 ready is evidence of that. It is going pretty well though and I think IG 1.x customers will be happy with the end result. Most of the complexity offered by the new features is tucked away so you only need to deal with it if you need it.

A good example of hidden complexity is the new appearance panel which lets you choose from either a pre-created appearance template (aka theme), do basic tweaking to create a more personalised look or delve in at the deep end and configure the individual CSS element properties of your gallery. The advanced tab basically hides a full on graphical CSS editor. It’s certainly not hard to use, but if ever you’ve played with CSS design you’ll know the sheer amount of customisability you have can be a bit overwhelming and there isn’t much getting around that. I’ve tried to limit things a bit where it’s sensible to do so, but I don’t want to limit the creativity of advanced users either.

For non CSS gurus it’s designed so you can pick any of the supplied templates and customise them how ever you want. The original templates are never modified so you can always go back if you don’t like the changes. If you create something beautiful and want to use it in other galleries (or indeed share it with other people) you can easily add your template into the list, import or export it.

IG2 does away with the concept of needing to manually save your work, your gallery is automatically saved continually as you change it. You can access any gallery you have worked on quickly in the My Galleries panel. There are some convenience functions for importing and exporting galleries, duplicating them, previewing and doing quick uploads.

I originally tried to implement things around a traditional save model but the performance was pretty ugly. It was necessary to make a copy of your entire gallery each time you opened it in case you chose not to save changes (either that or it would have to regenerate your gallery from scratch each time you opened it or do a complicated check to see where the files on disk and the description of your gallery differed) and it involved shuffling back and forth between temporary copies and saved copies. I’d have to rename the product to something other than ‘Instant’ using this method so I think doing away with manual saving was the right route. You can easily duplicate your gallery if you want to be experimental in the My Galleries panel, but I think generally the undo function will suffice for most users. On the upside too it’s one less thing to worry about, your galleries’ will always be as you left them.

InstantGallery 2 puts a lot of its functionality into inspectors, again so it’s out of the way if you don’t want/need to deal with it. The range of effects and customisations you can make to images has increased dramatically. The new decorations, which I’ll release the specifications for nearer the release of IG2, allow for infinite customisation of your thumbnails. The standard way of working with images now is that changes only apply to the selected image – but you can quickly apply the effect to all images on a given page, or to an entire gallery using the action buttons at the bottom of each pane. This gives you a huge degree of flexibility – want thumbnails of different shapes and sizes on the same page? No problem. Different watermarks on some images? No Problem. This is also handy for trying out different effects and seeing how they look on a small selection of images without having to go through the process of updating everything which can be a big time saver if you have a particularly large gallery.

Finally I’ll talk briefly about page styles. Previously in IG you basically had the option of making a page with a grid of images on it. IG2 adds a bunch more layout possibilities which you can mix and match within a single gallery. IG2 no longer spreads your images over a bunch of pages based purely on a hard limit of images per page. It’s totally up to you now how and where you distribute your images so you can get much more creative. Want one images on your first page, fifty on the second, ten on the third? It’s easy to do that now, just drag your pictures around in the source list and choose the page styles you want. Whether you want to highlight a particular graphic, create something more like a photo blog or an image catalogue, IG2 now caters to your needs. All of the layouts are further tweakable using the CSS editor too of course. I’m still perfecting the layouts and default CSS for them, but I hope to show you some example galleries in the not too distant future.

So that’s it for this little recap of InstantGallery 2, I hope you are as excited about this product as I am and will please forgive its slow arrival. I still can’t offer a firm date for release, but it’s getting sooner by the day. I think it will be worth the wait!

* I’d like to make an appeal to my fellow Mac devs, if you have experience with ConnectionKit and have any decent, commented and straightforward example code or know of a better FTP type framework which supports FTP, SFTP etc. you’d be will willing to share please drop me an email.

NewsGator, owners of Brent Simmons’ NetNewsWire (NNW) today announced that they would no longer be charging for the RSS reader. The full app which would have cost you $30 yesterday now costs you nothing. Of course NewsGator would like you to sign up for their subscription service, but that doesn’t appear to be a mandatory condition of using the application. This decision effectively sounds the death knell for the commercial Mac RSS market. NNW has had an insurmountable lead in the market for as long as I’ve been developing RSS products for the Mac (since 2002 no less), but at least before it was possible to compete on some terms with this juggernaut by providing specialized features, a simplified interface or different metaphor. However between the free basic RSS readers such as Vienna and the full fledged NNW there really is no oxygen left in this already ridiculously crowded market.

Honestly I am a little bitter about this, what NewsGator has done is effectively anti-competitive, NNW has somewhere between 10 to 17% of the entire RSS market (that’s across all platforms) and probably 70% or more of the Mac share (I’ve not been able to dig up any conclusive figures on this however). To suddenly make that product free is obviously going to decimate the competition. It’s hard to compete with a product that’s as well known and frankly as good as NNW, it’s damn near impossible to compete with it when it’s free. I’d love to be proven wrong, but as we’ve seen before, when a product in a near monopoly position and gets an unfair advantage over its competitors it tends to lay waste to all around it.

You might say Safari RSS is free, or Vienna is free, those products haven’t killed the Mac RSS market. It’s true they haven’t, though of course they’ve taken their share of customers away from the commercial RSS developers’. Still neither of those products is even remotely as mature, polished or comprehensive as NNW. To give you an example in a more widely understood market, making Nisus Writer or Pages free tomorrow wouldn’t do much to dent Microsoft’s dominance of the word processor market. Microsoft making Word free on the other hand would have a very big impact on all the developers producing 3rd-party word processors.

How this impacts NewsLife

I’m not discontinuing NewsLife, I’ll say that right off the bat – I designed NewsLife to be my ideal news reader and obviously that isn’t NNW or I’d have given up long ago and switched to that. From a business perspective I would like it to pay for its development however, so I’ll be watching sales closely to see what happens. The market NewsLife is aimed at differs from NNW’s, but even so I’m expecting a negative impact. I hope you’ll continue to support independent Mac developers and look at all the alternatives available and not let ‘free’ be the deciding factor in your software choices, as hard as that can be.

With its new dark window theme Leopard requires a shift in icon design for things to look right. In particular older icons designed in the 10.0 – 10.4 era often look blurry and indistinct. Why is this? Well often it’s due to drop shadows, vague outlines and colours not being strong enough to stand out well against the darker grey background. Luckily the fix is fairly simple but it may require reworking your icon artwork quite a bit in some cases. To get the best results in Leopard use bold colours with subtle gradients, dark, sharp borders and avoid Aqua gloss as it’s starting to look dated now. Excessive anti-aliasing and drop shadows are best avoided too as they make the edges of icons indistinct.

I’ve made my feelings about capsule buttons pretty clear by now, but it’s worth saying again to avoid using them. There are a number of reasons for this, both aesthetic and from a usability stand point. Using capsules somewhat necessitates grouping icons which limits the user’s ability to customise their toolbar, this may have a negative impact on their workflow. In cases where you do need to group controls it’s better to use a segmented control using the unified button theme as seen in the Finder’s View control.

In capsule buttons icons are reduced significantly in size from the glorious, large 32×32 pixels OS X pioneered back down to the miserable 16×16 size commonly used in Windows. Obviously you can’t convey as much detail in 16×16 pixels and you’re working on top of a two tone background which also has design implications. You’re also not gaining any additional space by using capsules either as the buttons themselves consume the same amount of space as a regular 32×32 icon would while providing less useful visual information to the user. Small icons are often much better conveyed with simple monochrome glyphs as Safari nicely demonstrates. With capsule buttons you’ll feel compelled to use colour and drop shadows and other visual flare to stand out from capsule itself and it all becomes a mess like in Mail app.

When is it appropriate to use small monochrome icons like in the Finder or Safari then? Well I’d say when you’re trying to convey simple ideas. It’s easy to just use arrows to convey back and forward actions like in a web browser, but for more complex actions, say ‘post to weblog’, you really need to use colour and all those extra pixels will make life considerably easier for your icon designer and users alike. It’s important to think carefully about the items that will appear in your toolbar before you start down either path as the two styles don’t really co-exist very well.

My friend and fellow British Mac developer Steve Harris has just released version 2.0 of Together, a classy digital scrap book of sorts that lets you store and organise just about anything. Version 2.0 require Leopard and looks gorgeous for it – check out the shelf!

Delays, delays, delays…

Yeah InstantGallery 2 has hit further delays pushing it into December now – sorry folks it just can’t be helped. This is the down side of doing freelance web and icon work as well as software development, sometimes you just get hit with more than you can handle in a short period of time and it tends to put the squeeze on my software development efforts as that has the most flexible deadlines.

InstantGallery 2 is still slowly approaching with the end of November marked tentatively in my calendar as release time. Here’s a big sneaky peak:

Here it is running on Leopard. It will be fully compatible with Tiger too of course, it even detects which OS version you’re using and mods the UI slightly so it fits in better with the visual look of your system. The UI is evolving all the time so there will no doubt be a few more changes before release time.

Leopard compatibility

iKana, InstantGallery 1.7 and NewsLife should all run fine under Leopard. If you experience any problems after upgrading please send me your bug reports and I’ll get any necessary fixes out as soon as possible. They run fine under the lastest developer seed of Leopard though so I’m hopeful there won’t be any unforeseen issues.