jAlbum 10.5 is fourth release in three weeks
Less than three weeks after launching jAlbum 10.4, an update that "perhaps should have been labelled jAlbum 11", according to its makers, the Swedish web album creation tool has been updated again with a number of improvements and feature tweaks.
jAlbum 10.5 claims to improve album downloading by up to eight times, plus adds the ability to import albums created in the desktop application as well as online. It also promises that album projects can now be moved and copied without breaking. jAlbum 10.5 is in fact the fourth update of the program since version 10.4 was released on March 2, with three minor updates appearing in a 48-hour period from March 7-9.
jAlbum 10.5’s headline feature achieves faster download speeds thanks to its new-found ability to handle simultaneous file transfers, so multiple files from an album can be downloaded at once. The update also introduces a new option that allows users to force all GIF and PNG images in an album to be converted to JPEG prior to uploading.
A number of the program’s updates concern the skinning tools. The program is now capable of automatically detecting and handling incompatible skins, while the New Skin developer tool now asks the user what base skin to use for their customized skin. Three skins, Turtle, Base and Mr Burns, are also updated, while the Mac version no longer makes the Skins folder visible, thus protecting skins from being modified incorrectly by users.
The embedded Skin Editor will warn users if they attempt to modify bundled skins -- doing so can lead to problems whereby changes are lost when skins are updated. Finally, the “lifeboat file”, a means of rescuing albums, now includes support for customised pages, which means that entire websites can now be restored using the feature.
jAlbum 10.5 is a free download for non-commercial use on Windows, Mac and Linux. Albums generated in the free version are ad-supported -- these are removed on purchasing a Standard (€19) or Pro (€39) license depending on the intended use of the program.