TodaysArt08 was fantastic! Last Friday and Saturday night The Hague (The Netherlands) felt like the cultural epicenter of the world, with Compagnie Retouramont dancing buildings vertically and Electroheads componing melodies with self generated lightning, Interactive playgrounds in the City hall and Nouvelle Vague playing the crowds in the Anthon Phillips Theatre.Ten professional photographers worked with us, capturing 40 of the 200 acts that performed in the city centre of The Hague. After each act the photographers dropped their images at our booth and we directly uploaded selections into a live photostream. The stream ran embedded in todaysart.nl, bright.nl, boomerang.nl and other websites. For the stream we used a regular Viewbook pro account, but with a reversed running to get the last uploaded images in front of the gallery.

We would like to thank the photographers that worked with us. Thumbs up for: harmendejong.nl, diknicolai.com, philnijhuis.nl, rudinswagerman.nl, christophvoorn.com, annafotografie.nl, irisvetter.com, michaelelbers.nl, jozefscuric.viewbook.com

We’ve teamed up with TodaysArt international festival for adventurous creativity that takes place 26 and 27 September 2008 in The Hague, The Netherlands. TodaysArt 2008 is a weekend of unique and cutting edge artistic showcases, an inspiring audiovisual stronghold of all different contemporary currents and crossovers in art, music and technology. Online galleries for participating artists will be provided by Viewbook so they can easily promote themselves and the festival. Check out todaysart.viewbook.com and share the galleries with all art-loving people you like. The widget above holds a selection of artists that will perform at the festival. Click the share icon and see how easy that goes.

We’re setting up a live photo stream on the website of TodaysArt and some mayor news sites as well. We are going to shoot with eight professional photographers and will upload things from a glass house in the center of the festival. It’s great how this cooperation shows the versatility of Viewbook. All is done with use of one regular Viewbook pro account. Oh yes, check http://www.todaysart.nl, the embedded gallery that’s a Viewbook as well!

Today I (the person in black) gave a small presentation to 150 students who are going to do usability tests with Viewbook. Around fourty groups will observe how test persons work with Viewbook and deliver us their findings. We’re very curious what they will come up with. If you find anything that could be more clear with Viewbook in your experience, please let us know.

This is just a short message to inform you, in the midst of the summer holidays (I just came back from a short holiday at the west-coast of Italy), about recent things we’re working on at Viewbook.

This August we’re going to release another great overhaul of Viewbook. Based on your feedback and new insights we will release new features, better help pages and a completely new improved product website. Some of the new features include: cropping and positioning of images (finally!), new embed configuration options, more font options and the possibility to backup your presentation images into a .zip file. There’s lots of new stuff coming!

We’re also working on a Viewbook ‘Experts’ network to enrich communication with our users in many countries. We already have some great people supporting us in Belguim, France, England and The United States. We’ll post a message as soon as we’re requesting for new participants.

If you have any ideas or wishes that would make Viewbook a better tool for you, let us know by posting your ideas in the Viewbook forums here.

For now, enjoy the summer, and we’ll keep you posted.

Today Viewbook reached the magical number of 10.000 users! We’d like to thank everyone who made this possible. Special thanks goes out to our beta testers, thanks for all the invaluable feedback. For our 10.000th user we have a special gift, “The Art Of Looking Sideways”, a brilliant -and beautifully designed- book by Alan Fletcher one of the worlds greatest designers. The book is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between word and image. A lot of big thinkers come across, from Goethe to Philip Starck from George Orwell to Charles Eames. So happy reading to lucky Ailine Liefeld, the book will be with you in a couple of days.