The site has not been updated for a very long time - there have been no new releases of vSlider for a while, and even most of the email I’ve received is still piling up unanswered.
But this was for a very good reason - my full attention has been diverted to an ambitious new project, which has been kept under wraps for quite a while.
But no longer - this week Gaikai was publicly announced at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. This announcement was made a bit ahead of time (it wasn’t planned until summer), but the fact that OnLive has made the news… well…, brought a change of plans

Gaikai is a startup I’ve co-founded last year. Together with my partners-in-crime, Andrew Gault and David Perry, we are working on a breakthrough concept and technology we call “Streaming Worlds”. It allows players to experience the full richness of modern games directly on their browsers without installing any custom plugins. Instead, the games are run remotely on a cloud infrastructure, the graphics and sound are converted into a video stream in real time and delivered directly into your browser. The technology works, and it is *extremely* cool

I would love to tell you more, but right now most of it is top-secret…

As you can imagine, this takes ALL of my time (and then some), so most likely I won’t be able to keep vSlider updated any more. It seems to still work well on the WordPress 2.7.x, but then again, it might break horribly somewhere I haven’t noticed… The code is, as has always been, freely available and I’m more than happy to pass on the development task to anyone with the time and skills. If you are interested, drop me a line.

Stay tuned…

• Added Gravatar support for “post authors” (enabled through the regular Posts panel on the vSlider Theme Options). Only available for WP 2.5 and above.
• Also added Gravator support for “comment authors” (enabled through a new Comments panel in the vSlider Theme Options). Also only available for WP 2.5 and above.
• Now it’s possible to select the location of the top menu (right, center or left). Until now, the menu was always on the right.
• Added a new option to center the header image (useful for non-repeating images when using Fluid width).
• Added support for PNG and GIF files for headers (only supported JPG before). Also fixed a small bug where files with extensions in upper case were not correctly identified.
• Added support for the “nextpage” quicktag, which allows breaking a big post into multiple pages.
• Adjusted a bit the layout of the vSlider Theme Options in line with the new WP administration look and feel.
• Fixed an issue in the KBurnalizer library which resulted in some weird looking fading effects.
• Fixed a bug in the header that resulted in the inner corners being hidden when using KBurnalizer.
• Removed the 200 return code on the 404 page.
• Fixed a small display bug on the bottom of the 404 page.
• Fixed a bug on the RSS feed of Comments.
• Fixed a bug in the comments sections where in some situations the author’s comments weren’t properly colored.
• Fixed a bug that prevent Dynamic albums from working in Gallery2.

Hope you enjoy the new features and that with this update most of those pesky little problems that have been around for some time are finally fixed. However, there are still some known issues that some users have found when using vSlider that I can’t really solve since they are related to other scripts. These are the ones I am aware of:

• Enabling the internal the Lightbox script of WPG2 breaks the slide up/down feature on the posts. The workaround is to keep this option disabled and use the WP Lightbox plugin instead.
• Using any Lightbox script (either from WPG2 or the standalone plugin) prevents editing some theme options in Gallery2. This problem affects ANY embedded theme, not just vSlider. I’ve informed one the authors of WPG2 about this issue.
• When using vSlider in Gallery2 with the Lightscript plugin activated, the “title” of the pictures that pops out when hovering the mouse doesn’t look “nice”, because it includes some HTML markup code. Unfortunately, there is no way to avoid this, since Lightbox uses this field for the description text below the photo, and in the case of vSlider, this text has the link to the original photo page.

I’m also making some minor layout changes around this site.

• USA
• Denmark
• Switzerland
• New Zealand
• Bangladesh

There are also some curious facts: Denmark has been completely covered (except Greenland), and both Switzerland and Bangladesh are almost there (ok, they are small, so that helps ).

Thanks again guys, and spread the word!

So, what’s new? The single biggest change is the new “pre-rendering” feature for the rounded corners. If you recall, the main driver for creating version 3 was the ability to have configurable colors and sizes, but still have nice touches like rounded corners and shadows. The solution to achieve this was based on a lot of Javascript code being executed once the page was loaded, which worked great. Unfortunately, it became apparent that in long pages, with a lot of posts or comments, this slowed down the rendering of the page considerably. Version 3.1 introduces a new technique - when you choose new colors for your theme, vSlider pre-renders the matching rounded corners and stores them as normal image files on the server side. This is done only once. Then the theme templates will use these to assemble the post frame, using regular HTML. This results in no Javascript code, and it is much, much faster. The image generation is completely done in PHP and adjusts to any selection, so any color combination is possible. The only restriction is that you must have the GD library enabled in your PHP installation. I believe this to be the case for most people, but in case you don’t have it, you can either enable it or ask your host provider to do that for you. vSlider will tell you if you can use this feature or not. If you can’t, you can still use the previous Javascript way - for most websites, this is also a good alternative.

On Gallery, the most important change is that Lightbox spans across multiple pages. Before, you could only do Next and Prev on the photos that were actually visible in a single page. Now it includes all photos of the chosen album.

There are also new features, such as configurable number of open posts, showing the post author under the title, support for the native WP tags, new subnavigation bar, better support for WPG2 and quite a few bug fixes.
You can get more details from the download pages.

Also, for the first time since I started iRui.ac, I’ve decided to change the width – I’m still quite fond of the original 800 pixel base, but I have to admit is quite narrow for modern resolutions. And the extra space does come in handy.

In other news, I’m now running the latest vSlider 3.1, which I will be making available for download shortly. I’ll go into detail about what’s new when it’s ready, but the most obvious and important change is that the speed of rendering the pages should now be drastically higher than before. If you are a regular here, you probably already noticed it