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Viewbook Portfolio for iPad — Update available now!

By Paul | October 18th, 2011 | No Comments

Viewbook Portfolio for iPad, the cleanest mobile digital portfolio, is now updated with the following features:

- Presentation mode (hide the ‘all albums’ tab and the edit buttons)
- Custom display name in the left top corner
- Hide and show portfolio tabs in your portfolio from the portfolio menu
- Optimization of the gallery viewer
- Additional sharing options: export to Facebook and to the iPad Photo Library

Furthermore, it has some minor UI updates and is ready for iOS 5.

> More about Viewbook Portfolio for iPad
> Get Viewbook Portfolio for iPad on the App Store
> How to use – full walkthrough

Viewbook V3 : Status update 2

By Rien | August 26th, 2011 | 8 Comments

This is a second status update on the progress of Viewbook V3, the project name for ‘Viewbook Version 3′.

In our previous update last June I told you about the challenges in interaction and interface design that we took on earlier this year and how the first prototypes of parts of the new system gave us an idea of how things really worked as software.
We discovered that most of our ideas are working out as we had hoped but we also optimized and changed a lot in the user interface. It takes time, clear thinking and many iterations to make thinks simple, elegant and easy to understand. It’s exactly like Steve Jobs says:

“When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.”

We need at least another month or two to work out all the details to make everything ready for a month or two of testing and refining. Then the first (beta) release will be made public.

Be sure to check v3.viewbook.com for sketches, updates and sneak previews. We welcome your feedback. If you have any questions, see the Viewbook V3 FAQ and feel free to contact us here.

> All posts about Viewbook V3
> v3.viewbook.com

Notify me when V3 Beta is available.


Sketchbook of the forthcoming Viewbook V3 website builder.

By Paul | July 26th, 2011 | 9 Comments


v3.viewbook.com

Alongside updates and announcements on the Viewbook Blog, we launched a constantly updating ‘digital sketchbook’ on v3.viewbook.com. Managed by everyone within the design and development team, it captures moments within the development process in sketches, sneak previews, animations, quotes, thoughts, tweets, photos etc. around the development of the new portfolio website builder. Sometimes very legible, sometimes very in-depth; a quite spontaneous heap of different pieces of information, mirroring how V3 evolves.
We hope it will give you a nice insight in all aspects of this big project and what you can expect from V3. We keep a sharp eye on all your comments within the Blog, Twitter and Facebook, and select & publish these bits that inspire us most!

> v3.viewbook.com
> All posts about Viewbook V3

Notify me when V3 Beta is available.


In the works: Viewbook V3, The next generation portfolio website builder

By Rien | April 26th, 2011 | 41 Comments

We are very excited to tell you about ‘Viewbook V3′ which is currently being developed. The last two months we have been creating a whole new vision on what Viewbook should be in the near future. Here is a rundown of what we came up with.


Ronny and Paul presenting design ideas.– Music by: Tyler wat doe je?

With Viewbook V3 we bring you a completely new ‘next generation’ website builder. A flexible design tool that gives you more control on the creation and customization of your portfolio website. With the idea of you being able to create your portfolio perfectly, we’re working on the following ideas and features:

Modules & Galleries
We introduce a new concept called ‘modules’. A module allows you to easily drag & drop bits of functionality onto the stage. Portfolio websites need outstanding galleries and representations of your work. What we are creating are fully configurable collections, albums and contact sheets. Including horizontal and vertical scrolling galleries. Our focus is to offer you the choice how you want your images to display, including flexible cropping, sizing, alignment, spacing, and many more options. We’re putting a lot of effort in this to make Viewbook outstanding when it comes down to image display.

Many other features as modules
Simply drag & drop twitter feeds, social buttons, text-fields, images & video anywhere on your page. No need to add custom code or markup to text-fields anymore.

Adjustable page formats & layouts
You can start with predefined page formats. That works for most people. But if you think your site requires more options or a different composition, you can change many properties of the page; it’s layout, modules, order and alignment of elements. You can add new modules to your page, and create pages that combine galleries, video and text for example. This allows creating many design options and variations, while keeping the user interface simple to understand.

Redefined page editor
Center-stage in the the website builder is the page editor. This is what you will be looking at the most of the time, while creating your site. It consist out of editor panels (for page properties, modules and selection settings) and the stage ( your webpage canvas ).

Custom CSS
If you want all influence on how things look, we’ll add and option for custom CSS so webdesigners can change the appearance of any element on the page.

New user interface
With a lot more features and customization options, the interface still needs to maintain its clarity. Therefore we are redesigning the user interface, to let you work more intuitively and make better use of space. Bottom line is, we want it to be easy enough for people without webdesign knowledge and powerful enough for webdesigners. That’s a real challenge.

Other improvements
There’s too much to mention here but we’re also implementing a lot of other smaller features like; favicons, better video display, more menu styling options and scalable backgrounds.

That’s a quick overview of things to come. I understand it’s still very abstract. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get the terminology just jet. Honestly, we have daily discussions on what things are called, and just started writing the Viewbook Terminology Manual.

So when will it be ready?
We have an idea but as with all larger software projects, it is very, very hard to estimate time needed for completion. So I’m not going to give a date, let’s say we’re working hard to get it released later this year. We keep you posted during the process as much as possible, and let you know when things become more clear.

Your existing sites will keep working in V3!
You don’t need to worry about redesigning your complete site from scratch in V3. So there’s no need to wait for V3 to come out. We’re also not planning to change prices or other terms.

If you have any feature requests please add them to our feature requests page. This way other people can comment and vote.

> All posts about Viewbook V3

Notify me when V3 Beta is available.


Aperture export plugin for Viewbook

By Rien | April 4th, 2011 | 13 Comments

As of now a plugin to export images from Apple’s Aperture to Viewbook is available here. So from now on you can create new presentations and update your Viewbook website straight from your Aperture library.

On January the 29th I received this e-mail from Jean-Christophe Gallagher: “I am new to Viewbook, and I like it so far! I’d like to obtain an api key, as I am building my own export plug-in for Aperture.” I immediately asked Jean-Christophe if he wanted to make the plugin publicly available. Two months later it is ready and available for everyone to use! A big thank you to Jean-Christophe.

The plugin comes with an installer, exports IPTC data (captions) to Viewbook, allows you to select and create a new Viewbook album within the plugin and allows you to choose how to compress and size your images when exporting to Viewbook.

We’ve added the plugin to Viewbook’s add-ons page or you can get it via the link below.

> Download and instructions.

New mobile Galleries for iPad, iPhone and Android

By Rien | March 17th, 2011 | 17 Comments

Developing fluidly functioning mobile galleries for the iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices is not an easy task; dealing with memory issues, different versions of operating systems and many different screen sizes makes it a very specialized job. We’ve put a lot of effort in this and we’re very happy with the result. Here’s a breakdown of the major new features and improvements.

The touch ‘swipe’ navigation is improved drastically. We’ve also added image titles and descriptions and a new interface design. There’s a slide show option and loading and unloading of images is optimized for the memory limit of mobile devices. But that’s not all, we’ve generated special lighter mobile versions of your images to make them load faster for a smooth viewing experience, also for the slower mobile connections. The gallery works on any browser and any screen size on any device. The option to put the gallery as an icon on your iPad’s home screen is great for if you want to view it later or show it to someone else. From your home screen the gallery opens without a browser bar for an even cleaner view.

I think we can say we now offer the best performing and cleanest mobile galleries around. Happy to hear your reactions below.

New Album Styling Features

By Alrik | January 14th, 2011 | 1 Comment

We just released some new features and enhancements for the album styling, to help you style your albums more visually and faster and give you some extra options. Read more in the step by step tutorial.

New styling panel design
The new styling panel gives you an overview of the different aspects that you can style, in stead of showing you all detailed options at once, like it was before. You can now click on one of the options, it opens up and gives you the specific options to edit. Click again and voila! It closes.

Album style presets
Saving page designs as presets was already possible, but now you can create style presets for your albums as well. Saving an album style preset for your client presentations and another one for the albums that you embed elsewhere and another for the albums that you tweet, saves you a lot of time. Every new album that you create you can apply the saved preset to in just a few clicks.

Album credit link
You can now add a credit link in the footer of your albums, which brings visitors to your main site. So for all albums that you send to people via e-mail or share via Twitter, Facebook or any other place, they see the link to your main website, or any other site that you like them to go to. This little text field can also be nice to mention credits and copyrights.

Simpler URL’s for your Sites and Pages

By Alrik | January 14th, 2011 | 1 Comment

A much requested feature. We’ve skipped the “/portfolio” part in your Page URL’s. This makes links to your Pages much simpler.

Page URL’s
Before, page URL’s were in the form of:
username.viewbook.com/portfolio/work
Or when on a custom domain: yourname.com/portfolio/work

The new page URL will have this form:
username.viewbook.com/work
or yourname.com/work

When you create a second website the name of the site will be included in the URL, for example:
username.viewbook.com/commercial/work
or yourname.com/commercial/work

You can create as many sites as you like and all sites will have more logical URL forms this way.

Album URL’s
By making the page URL’s simpler we had to make the Album URL’s a bit more complicated. The URL’s to your albums now include an “/album” part.

Before, album URL’s were in the form of:
username.viewbook.com/fashion

Now, album URL’s will be in the form of:
username.viewbook.com/album/fashion

Naturally, all your current URL’s will stay fully functional. However, there is one but. If a new page has the same URL as an old album, the page will be displayed, not the album. In this case, use the new album URL.

Your ideal iPad Portfolio app?

By Rien | August 23rd, 2010 | 22 Comments

Update: See our iPad Portfolio page with the latest announcements!

We’ve already shared our enthousiasm about the iPad. We can now tell you that Viewbook is in the process of creating a native iOS portfolio app for the iPad and iPhone that syncs with your Viewbook Albums.

A couple of key requirements we’ve formulated are:

  • The option to store Albums locally so you can view them offline, without an internet connection.
  • A nice visual overview with big thumbs of all your locally stored Albums.
  • The option to set a default portfolio that opens as soon as you launch the app, so you can directly show your work without first looking up which album you want to show.
  • The option to easily email a link to the online version of your album/portfolio.

Do you already use your iPad or iPhone to show your work? What are your experiences? Do you have other ideas that would make it ideal for you?

Let us know in the comments.