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When theatre walks down the streets

August 18, 2010

Festival organisers started using fluxiom to upload, distribute and archive the avalanche of photographs that help publicise and document the event.

Every year for nine days, at the beginning of August, La Strada takes over the streets of Graz, Austria’s second largest city centre, for a whirlwind tour of what’s hot, what’s unique and what’s relevant in street art, contemporary performances and puppeteering.

In 2010, the festival organisers started using fluxiom to upload, swap, distribute and archive the avalanche of photographs that help research, plan, publicise and document the event. (That’s a lot of verbs, for an even greater amount of data!)

If you manage a public event, of any scale, we recommend taking a look at the detailed case study, but we couldn’t resist sharing the following bit of fluxiom-powered art…

In order to promote the festival and encourage visitors to go see these unique ephemeral performances, organisers use fluxiom-powered screens to disseminate photos of the day’s key events.

Entirely dynamic and Stages-based, the screens pool data right from the festival’s account. Updating them is therefore a simple matter of applying and removing tags, as photographers roam the streets with their portable gear. Here they are, in action:

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Geo-location lands in fluxiom

August 11, 2010

Starting today, fluxiom will automatically expose location data stored within your files.

The location information is displayed in the details panel.

Whether you are an enthusiast geocacher, document town and country in expansive photo-shoots or simply wish to remember where exactly you saw that breathtaking sunset, GPS is the technology to turn to.

Today’s most popular cameras and smartphones automatically embed GPS coordinates into images, making it a snap to know precisely where and in which conditions a particular picture was taken. That information is often stored within the photo file itself, as part of its “metadata,” the very same series of pointers fluxiom parses to provide you with in-depth information about your assets.

Starting today, fluxiom will automatically expose any location data stored within your files. Better still, because raw coordinates do not mean much to us humans, that information is displayed along with a small Google Maps thumbnail, which you can click to access full and detailed data about the area.

Location data is immediately available across all plans for both upcoming and existing assets in your account — no need to re-upload anything — and is automatically displayed as a new category in your usual Details panel if there is any such information to be extracted from the file.

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Announcing our souped-up API

July 22, 2010

At fluxiom, we strongly believe in the power of APIs and application integration. By integrating fluxiom with other web-based services, be they your own custom solutions or existing Web 2.0 applications, it is possible to create an all-automated, fluid workflow that saves time, money and frustration. For example, did you know fluxiom serves as the backend to one of Europe’s largest high-volume, high-speed printers, that handles all the biggest advertising campaigns for prestigious brands?

Benefits of the new API

Today, we are announcing a cleaner and richer API that’s better documented, too. You can head over to our API page for the latest documentation, tips and code examples. In a nutshell, this new API provides:

1. Richer access to the account contents, including tag management and improved file uploads for an all-automated workflow, from data input to organisation.

2. Multiple working formats: we now offer JSON in addition to our traditional XML interface, for better compatibility with enterprise back-ends.

3. Much, much better documentation because good code is documented code and documentation ensures forward compatibility.

We have also reviewed and updated our back-end to further stabilise and accelerate API interactions, especially when dealing with repeated instructions and large data sets.

Getting started

Setting up a great API is as much about the journey, as it is about the destination. All accounts, including our Free plan include access to the API, making it really easy to get going and test the waters. (Of course, you cannot access features that are not included in the plan.)

If you have questions or experience any difficulties with the new API, please contact Developer Relations, and know we are committed to helping you get your project off the ground.

We hope this improved API makes it easier for you to build the workflow of your dreams, and welcome your comments and thoughts on what you would like us to implement next.

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Saving Private fluxiom

June 24, 2010

Since we launched fluxiom, our Private plan has been an affordable way for users to start using the essentials of the service. Today, as fluxiom continues its growth, we are retiring this particular plan, and focusing on our higher-end options.

Indeed, since the introduction of the Free plan, the Private plan has had little new to offer of its own, and we find users who previously used the Private plan as a way to test fluxiom are now jumping directly from Free to our professional offerings. What’s more, at 19 euros a month with 10 GBs of storage and all our advanced features, we believe the Solo plan offers the best possible value to individual users.

The remainder of our pricing structure remains unaffected. The Free plan is still free, and the professional plans, starting from the freelancer-friendly Solo, are unaffected.

A note to our existing Private plan owners

You are welcome to stay on your current plan for as long as you want, and will continue to get the features you currently enjoy, at the price you currently pay (9 €/month). We are not forcing anyone to upgrade! However, if you ever decided to upgrade or downgrade from your Private plan, it would no longer be possible for you to go back to it.

Verifying the plan you are on

If you do not remember the plan you are on, your Account tab has the answer. We are also actively reaching out to users on the Private plan by email.

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Share in the fast lane

June 22, 2010

If you are in the habit of sharing or downloading lots of assets at the same time, by which we mean 700 MBs or more, you know it used to take a little while for fluxiom to package and prepare your data.

Sure, we have excuses: 700 MBs is a lot of data, compressing is resource-intensive and there are plenty of operations involved in replying to a seemingly simple click. Yet, we're not ones for excuses, so we went back to the drawing board, fired up the optometric optimiser and published an update to fluxiom.

This update focuses exclusively on under-the-hood improvements, and considerably speeds up the sharing and downloading features, without changing your existing workflows at all. As an example, it took only two seconds for fluxiom to group and start the download of 940 assets in one of our test accounts — that's 14 GBs of data! Sharing the same files, which entails packing up the data, generating a unique download link, and sending an email to the intended recipient, took a measly 5 seconds.

All accounts, from Free to Infinity, now benefit from these improvements. We hope you enjoy the speed — remember to fasten your seat belts!

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It's better with a partner

February 10, 2010

They say many things in life are better with a partner, and you know “they” can’t be wrong. When it comes to fluxiom on Mac OS X, our natural partner is Fluid, a great site-specific browser that places fluxiom in your Dock, complete with a custom icon and windows of its own.

If you haven’t yet used Fluid, it’s a great way to keep fluxiom open and available all the time, independently from your browser tabs. It’s also a way to ease your users into the crazy concept of web applications, by blurring the lines between the desktop and the cloud. And, of course, since fluxiom’s interface is so desktop-like to begin with, many may never notice the difference.

Here are the bare essentials of a Fluid setup, but be sure to season to taste:

Setting up Fluid to access your fluxiom account

For the ultimate power tool arrangement, we recommend pairing fluxiom with fluxUp!, our native uploader for Mac OS X — and Windows. Upload, store and share files right from your Desktop. There is virtually no delay between the time a file is uploaded and the time it appears in your account interface, meaning fluxiom can take part in the fastest-paced workflows.

We now automatically provide Fluid instances with a custom icon — which you can change from within the application, of course — so that your Dock always looks its best. Our designers also gave the fluxUp! icon a little facelift of its own, empowering both applications to live together in “pairfect” harmony…

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We now support Google Chrome

February 02, 2010

Since Google announced its last software coup, the introduction of an innovative, colourful and, quite literally, shiny browser, dubbed Chrome, interest from our users has been considerable.

Indeed, Google Chrome has been built specifically for Web 2.0 applications like fluxiom. It offers breakthrough memory management, enhanced security and blazing fast JavaScript performance. What’s more, it shares a rendering engine with another cross-platform favourite, Safari. What’s not to love?

Of course, since fluxiom is standards-compliant, compatibility has never been an issue for adventurous users. However, we are glad to announce we now officially support Google Chrome, meaning we have gone through the system with a fine-tooth comb, tweaking, testing and enhancing our code to ensure the smoothest ride possible.

The update has already been rolled out, and users on other browsers should not notice any changes.

As always, we are here to help in case something happens.

Happy fluxin’!

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Do more, brand more, flux' more

January 26, 2010

Today, we are delighted to introduce further speed-ups, a smarter branding system, and a small, but significant change to video previewing.

Next to many nice interface tweaks, notably around the Tabs bar, and in the sub-menus of the Account section, here are the main changes:

Faster initial load

Initial loading times have been cut roughly in half, by dramatically diminishing the number of files we download from the server, as well as the size of these few components we cannot do without. This means fluxiom can now load as fast as 1.5 seconds on a good office connection.

To achieve this, we now optimise our support files with Jammit, and embed most of our images right into our CSS declarations.

Better branding

The branding interface has also been streamlined so that setting up and altering your branding is as painless as loading the results. For example, you can now play around with gradients without uploading a logo. We hope this will titillate your inner artist.

Speaking of branding, we now handle gradient generation via CSS, and have reduced the number of images involved throughout the process, resulting in further speed gains.

Branding at work

fluxUp!

fluxUp! Our free desktop uploader for Mac & PC.

Finally, if you have been using fluxUp! to upload your assets, you may like to know we will release an update later today to integrate the application with fluxiom’s new branding structure. So stay tuned.

Updated January 26, 2010:
We’ve just released the new Mac version of fluxUp!.
Updated January 27, 2010:
The Windows version is ready as well: fluxUp!.

Streaming video

If you are in the habit of handling large and long videos, you will no doubt notice we now stream your video previews. This means you can easily jump to any point in the file, without waiting for the initial frames to load. This makes it even easier to compare movies, or zoom right into your favourite sequences.

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