Photo Credits: Flufftreacle: One sole on pxCream

Happy day for pxcream today! We got our first press coverage through the “Top 100 Web 2.0 Applications” rankings in BRW Magazine !

Thanks heaps to Ross Dawson and Julian Hill that made that possible!

Photo Credits: Lalala: around a beer in Newtown on pxCream

Ourah! After weeks of development, pxCream went in Beta 1.0 today! A lot of improvements and changes. I tried to list them all here:

One more step toward simplicity and efficiency!

pxCream is making a big jump from Alpha version to Beta 1 version. This includes a whole bunch of new features and improvements. The administration interface now gives you much more information and ease of use. pxCream pages have been re-named. Cosmetic changes have been done to make sure that all pages are now clearer and easier to use and navigate through. The application architecture has been re-designed so that it’s easier to deploy new functions.

To maximise your experience with pxCream, I strongly recommend you to use either Mozilla Firefox or Safarion their last revision and get rid of ugly buggy IE 6/7…

See list below for detailed listing of functions and improvement.

New Navigation:
pxCream now has a top menu with drop down sub-menus. This menu is accessible on every pages and gives access to all other sections. This navigation system comes in replacement of the old icon based navigation. There is now more room for the pictures and the navigation is more intuitive.

New administration interface:
- New url: User administration interface is now reachable at http://www.pxcream.com/admin
- Cookies based identification: pxCream now uses cookies to facilitate use of the administration side and photostream navigation. Once you’ve logged into your pxCream account a cookie is created on your computer so that you don’t have to re-sign-in every time you close your Internet Browser or restart your computer.
- Password recovery system: In case you forgot your password you can now recover it trough a secured process. So you don’t need to bride me anymore to recover your password.
- Account statistics: Once logged into your administration interface you can review your account statistics. That includes number of page views per day (through a graphic) and other key statistics to help you monitoring activity on your pictures. More to come in the next rev.
- New process for picture upload: There is now only one step in picture uploading. All information about the picture have to be entered into one single page. This to make it faster for the user.
- New interface for picture upload: The unique upload page is featuring info bubbles to guide the user through the process.
- New naming: The “Darkroom” has been re-named into “Negatives”. The “Album” has been re-named into “Gallery”.
- Bigger thumbnails: Thumbnails on “Negatives” and “Gallery” pages are not square anymore but vignette shaped. It is now easier to identify different pictures.

Bigger is better:
- All pictures are now about 20% bigger on screen. Having bigger pictures has for direct consequence that the full-screen function has no more additional value. So it’s been withdrawn.
- Avatar pictures have their size increased by about 10%. They are now 30 x 30 px. It is purely cosmetic and gives more sex appeal to your pages.

Centralised information:
- pxCream now has a new information panel for each picture. From this information hub you can access all information about the picture (using the left side tabs).

New comment system:
- Comments you post on pictures are now linked with your account. If you don’t sign in before posting a new comment, this one won’t be linked to your account and will appear under a “guest” type of account.

Various improvement:
- New account name: pxCream accounts are now accessible via http://www.pxcream.com/photo/AccountName. The “photoblog” word is replaced by simply “photo” to make it clearer to more people. However the old urls (http://www.pxcream.com/photoblog/AccountName and http://www.pxcream.com/photoblog/AccountName/pctID) are still operating to guarantee link persistency. If you are redirecting your domain name to your pxcream account (like I do with http://www.mcfull.com), I recommend that you update your domain name setting to the new URL schema.
- New naming for pages: In order to improve the navigability and understanding of what is pxCream, most pages have been re-named. The default page is now called “photostream”. The “Thumbs” is now called “Overview”. All pages’ names are now written in white color at the top left of every pages. Navigation should now be clearer.
- Clean URLs: All URLs are now free of tech data (such as the size of your window). So if you send pxCream’s urls using copy/paste from your Internet browser you are guaranteed that your friend will get a working link.

I’m seeking another round of testing. To achieve that I’m willing to open 10 more slots of beta testing accounts. So if you have friends that you’d like to get on pxCream please put them in contact directly with me (pierre@pxcream.com). Cheers.

First user / beta tester to join pxCream, Tey (a.k.a Flufftreacle) has joined the service uploading his 3 first pictures in the last few days.

Having Tey on board is great first of course because he’s a great photographer but also because Tey just started a world around trip that will bring us a lot of pictures and will also be very interesting on a testing standpoint!

Being photoblogging when travelling around the world is quite a challenge as you often have to use many different computers and configurations to upload your photos…

The test is already very interesting as a dozen of bugs were detected and fixed in the first hours where Tey was using the system.

But enough talking, I leave you with Tey’s pictures, my favourite being that one:

> Flufftreacle’s photoblog
> Flufftreacle’s gallery
> Flufftreacle’s profile (work in progress)

Big news this week for pxCream, the picture online uploader is finished and rolling!

Highlights are:

- Real time ajax uploader
- Read EXIF and IPTC data (Time saving)
- Google Maps GPS localisation
- Licences management (CC, C, PD…)
- User Friendly (progress bar, information bubles…)

I recorded a quick video showing the system in action, it’s here.

All feedback is welcome!

Feedback is always good. It helps us to improve pxCream according to what our users are expecting. To do that we needed a good system to get the information from you, users. Because even trying hard, we can’t get in your brain.

So we have a couple of discussion groups on Tangler where you can tell us everything.

Click on the link to go to the discussion page or have a look to the current discussion in our “Your Feedback” topic through the embedded widget.

- General Discussion
- Feedback
- Help
- Tips and Tricks

Big day today!

This is our first day online on our new server!

We made the switch from our testing environment and we are now out in the wild wild web… ;))
This is also the day where we decided to start blogging about our work at pxCream. So from now on we will try to keep you updated as often as possible on what’s going on at pxCream ;))

If you’d like more informations / updates about us you can check out our others public profiles:

- Twitter
We post on Twitter all the small updates about the pxCream engine (maintenance, new functions, issues…).

- Facebook
You can support us becoming a fan of pxCream on Facebook ;))

- Tangler
We discuss all sorts of things on Tangler. That’s for example the place you need to go if you wish to give us a feedback on the application…

- Seesmic
We intend to use Seesmic like we use Twitter; to communicate quickly with our users on things happening…

- Flickr
We love Flickr so we have an account where we will upload all the pictures related with the company / project life.

We also have a RSS Feed that you can subscribe to.