PM5 (beta2) - PM Classic Exporter - observations

[Tony Hall]

Hi,

I currently use PM4's Classic Exporter for all my clients, it provides a clean and simple method for previewing and downloading images, and I really appreciate the new additions.

Here are a few observations, I've marked the ones I think are important problems with a "**".

• Clickable banner: excellent - thank you
• Toolbar: excellent - thank you, but..
  Now we have a clickable banner, there may not be the need to also have a 'Home Page' button as well. Leaving "Home Page:" and "Home URL:" options blank in the Exporter still means a small, empty button is rendered on the page. Ideally there would be no Home button at all.
• Filenames for vertical images in the thumbnail gallery are now wrapped to a second line, this doesn't happen with PM4.
• **Caption text under image does not align to the center or right, as set in the Exporter.
• **When setting the "Table Width:" to less than 100%, the table is reduced only on the right hand side. My guess (I know very little about HTML etc) is the table needs to be centrally aligned.
• When changing the "Table Width:" options in the Exporter, the cursor remains locked in the text box, and you can't click in any other text box to make other changes. (MacOS 10.7.4)
• If you choose to "disable right-Click Context Menu, you also disable the ability to right-click the download link below the image. Which is logical, but personally I'm keen to prevent inexperienced users from downloading the preview image, but would still like them to be able to download the hi-res image without navigating away from the gallery.

I've not tested the client selection options as I've never needed this functionality…yet, but I think it's an excellent addition.

Unfortunately I've not been able to exhaustively test every single option, these are the ones that have affected me so far.

Thanks again for all your hard work.

Cheers,
Tony

[Kirk Baker]

Tony,

The engineer that maintains that template no longer works for us.  I'll see if I can get his replacement to start to maintain that template.  He's pretty sharp and has excellent HTML skills.

I think the new features were a work in progress and were unfinished at the time of his departure.  If we can't get these issues fixed by our ship date, we'll revert the template back to the one in PM 4.6.9.

Thanks for the heads-up.

-Kirk

[Tony Hall]

If we can't get these issues fixed by our ship date, we'll revert the template back to the one in PM 4.6.9.

That would be a shame. I hope they're easily fixable.

Many thanks,
Tony

[Kirk Baker]

Tony,

If we can't get these issues fixed by our ship date, we'll revert the template back to the one in PM 4.6.9.

That would be a shame. I hope they're easily fixable.

I'm sure they are.  Hopefully he'll have the time to work on it.

-Kirk

[Tony Hall]

Hi Kirk,

Any update with this yet?

I've tried the latest beta (build 12996 (08aaae8)) and there appears to have been some changes as to how the PM Classic Exporter renders the galleries. But they still look different from PM4's galleries, so I've embraced these differences and had a play, and by changing the look of my galleries I can get a result I can live with.

However the idiosyncrasies I still notice:

• The caption text still doesn't abide by the exporter settings and only displays aligned to the left ('center' and 'right' are ignored).
• I get a spurious  (accented capital A, in case it doesn't display correctly in this posting) before a copyright symbol in the caption - © displays as ©.
• Long filenames are split over two lines under vertical images, and not under horizontal.

I'll be honest, the only one that still bothers me unduly is the © symbol display, which I feel is quite important.

I appreciate the Classic Exporter must be quite low down on your list of priorities, but I have a feeling (maybe erroneously) that you want to close the beta and release PM5 before the Olympics kicks off, so I thought I'd just bump this topic.

Keep up the excellent work.

Cheers,
Tony

[MacOS 10.7.4]

[Kirk Baker]

Tony,

Any update with this yet?

I've tried the latest beta (build 12996 (08aaae8)) and there appears to have been some changes as to how the PM Classic Exporter renders the galleries. But they still look different from PM4's galleries, so I've embraced these differences and had a play, and by changing the look of my galleries I can get a result I can live with.

However the idiosyncrasies I still notice:

• The caption text still doesn't abide by the exporter settings and only displays aligned to the left ('center' and 'right' are ignored).
• I get a spurious  (accented capital A, in case it doesn't display correctly in this posting) before a copyright symbol in the caption - © displays as ©.
• Long filenames are split over two lines under vertical images, and not under horizontal.

I'll be honest, the only one that still bothers me unduly is the © symbol display, which I feel is quite important.

I appreciate the Classic Exporter must be quite low down on your list of priorities, but I have a feeling (maybe erroneously) that you want to close the beta and release PM5 before the Olympics kicks off, so I thought I'd just bump this topic.

Brandon, our newest employee, made some improvements to the PM Classic Exporter in Beta 4.  He may have some more time before release to further address these issues.  Send him a personal message (username Brandon) and get in touch with him.

-Kirk

[Brandon]

The copyright symbol problem has been fixed and should be available with the next Release update.