The pics are also on flickr.

We got Editor’s Choice in our category in a contest sponsored by Photobucket.

His point being (I think) that Photobucket re-launched their Slide Show widget this summer and Slide is still kicking ass.

I like what Mashable has to say about our category:

Slide.com and RockYou have been the most talked-about widgets this year, with Slide.com gaining a little more traction with the MySpace set. Both are impressive products which give users the freedom to express themselves. Even the launch of MySpace’s own service, MySpace slideshows, didn’t put a dent in the popularity of these two slideshow tools.

Aha! I think I understand now …. :-)

Link to Mashable’s 2006 Social Networking Awards

Your average programming language has a way of doing the same thing over and over again multiple times. Maybe a few different ways. After all, that’s why god invented computers. I mean what’s programming language without iteration? Python has a neat way of doing this. You can say:

[python]
for i in xrange(x, y, s):

[/python]
xrange generates a list of integers (conceptually) from x to y, incrementing by s, so it’s a quick and clean way to do your repetitive business. True to Python minimalism, the first and last arguments are optional. If you leave them out the loop goes from 0 to y.

Sadly, SQL has no analogue. A local SQL veteran here has confirmed to me that SQL has no way of generating lists … you have to put stuff into a table. Give that this is the case, I decided to put my small but useful sequence (integer dates representing the past 48 hours, hour by hour) into a temporary memory table. Here’s how to do it:
[sql]
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE hourlycal ( id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, date int(11)) ENGINE = MEMORY;
INSERT INTO hourlycal (date) SELECT NULL FROM reporting.Session LIMIT 48;
UPDATE hourlycal SET date = FROM_UNIXTIME(UNIX_TIMESTAMP(),”%Y%m%d%H”) – id*3600;
DROP TEMPORARY TABLE hourlycal;
[/sql]

There you go. Very handy. At least for me. Note that it takes a table to make a table :-). You have to select from something in order to insert the NULL’s. This is based on ideas from Artful Software.

Link to Artful Software

Anybody want to buy my old camera?

… that’s the new one on the right.

I also made a SD700 shootout Slide Show with a bunch of example shots. These photos are unedited so as to show the results of the camera itself. Most of them were taken using full auto mode.

That’s right, it’s time for another “where the heck have you been for the past few weeks” update. So, what have we been up to?

I created a tutorial for our iPhoto Exporter which I’m happy with . The images got scaled a little weird but I’m not going to redo all those screenshots! :-)

As always we need more traffic on Slide for Macintosh blog. Where are you guys? I want 100 blogs linking to our site!

New Features. We packed a bunch of cool things into this release:

• New Text Mode Engine – Previously, enabling and disabling text mode mean you had to wait until Slide processed the images again to render an image representation of text. Now we treat text as it was meant to be treated: like text. So switch back and forth to your hearts content, the text mode changes instantly. Our new text engine also looks better. We threw some wordwrap technology in there for good measure.
• Mini Browser Preview Window – Want a quick preview instead of switching to Safari to read your news? Clicking on feed items now brings up a new and nifty mini web browser that Dave cooked up. Check it out! AppKit Framework scaling rocks ….
• Address Book Auto-completion – Don’t you just love the way Mail completes email addresses. It watches as you type and when you complete a recipients it get’s packaged up into a nice little rounded rectangle. Now Slide has that too! In the “Send To:” field of the Share Window, Slide will auto-complete names from your Mac OS X Address Book as well as your Slide Friends List.
• Recommended Slide Shows – Want something to watch? Click the “Play” button the ticker and check out our new Recommended Slide Shows feature. This smart playlist is full of good stuff and needs watchin’, so get to it!
• Edit Your Slide Shows – Now it’s even easier to edit your Slide Shows. Click “Edit..” from the context menu and you can modify your Slide Show right inside Slide.
• Add RSS Feed – RSS is back! Drop a feed:// URL onto Slide so you can watch all of your favorite Blogs and RSS feeds right in Slide.
• Upload Directly From Pasteboard – Who says we’re not helpful? Select an image in any application and hit Command-C to copy it … switch to Slide and hit Command-P. Yup, now you can upload your image to the Slide Show of your choice, no intermediate image file is required.
• Upload Progess in the Dock Icon – Keep an eye on how your uploads are going. Start an upload session and the Slide Dock Tile will display the number of images remaining to upload.
• Open Item in Frontmost Safari Window – Do you want your items to open in Safari but tired of a gazillion Safari Windows covering your screen? We added a new preference for you under “Controls.” You now have the option of Single click or Double click opening the item in the topmost Safari window. Let’s hear it for AppleScript!

Phew! I’m tired just thinking about all the bug fixes we did last week to get this thing out….

Link to Slide for Macintosh.

Wow! Tons of awesome cool stuff. I haven’t worked this hard since college, and next week is WWDC ….

• Download the Slide Dashboard Widget! It’s cute and gorgeous and has cool content to choose from on the back
• Another crazy update of Slide for Macintosh. Drag and drop files or URLs into the ticker and broadcast them all over the Web. It’s crazy fun. Learn all about it on …..
• The Slide for Mac Blog! Yes, Macintosh community! Stay up to date with new features, tutorials, screed, feature ideas, and all the other reasons blogs are great….

Link to the Slide for Mac Blog.
Link to Slide for Macintosh.
Link to the Slide Dashboard Widget.