Armchairware blog

You can download the 1.0.6.0 release of Photato here. Please be aware that this is an experimental release rather than a beta as there is a significant amount of code that has been rewritten compared to the previous beta release and hence is only available through the link above and in the support forum. The version on the homepage download link will remain as the 1.0.5.0 beta for the time being. The idea with this release is that it will be tested by those of you who want to be at the bleeding edge so that I can iron out the major bugs before making a general release of the next beta.

The biggest change is that Photato now synchronises with Facebook every 24 hours (this period will be configurable but isn’t currently) rather than trying to pull the data down that the user requests as they request it. For various reasons the old communication method resulted in some poor performance hence the need to move to a synchronisation model. Once the initial synchronisation has finished (which can take a few minutes) then the performance of the add-in should be noticeably quicker, especially for photos of tagged friends. Subsequent synchronisations will then happen in the background as long as when you log-in you check the ‘keep me logged into Photato’ check-box.

Here’s a quick summary of the major improvements in this release:

- Supports Windows 7 RC1
- New Friends screen
- New Friend details screen
- Switch User functionality implemented
- Facebook Login screen now implemented as a popup dialog
- Synchronisation communication model via a Windows Service

I’d really appreciate as much feedback on this release as possible (ideally through the support forum) as I’m trying to get to a final release version of Photato as quickly as possible. Please report everything that you notice that’s not working as you’d expect, anything that appears to be working but you’d prefer to work differently or anything that’s not implemented but you’d like to see in the product. I am aware of a number of bugs both in UI and underlying Facebook access code but this version is certainly usable so please give it a go.

Thanks
Martin