Ben is not easily impressed and he's been bouncing off the walls here.

I watched him using it and will give it a spin myself later today. My impression is it's very powerful but takes a few minutes to figure out how to use it.

Overall, an incredibly promising start and boy are people clamoring for what it offers.

Thanks!
Baldy

Originally Posted by Ben I emailed this to you personally as well, but I thought I would post it here in public. This is my new favorite thing ever. Fantastic job. This is really really really awesome. It has just become my default uploader. I know a lot of people are really going to be happy with this.

I'm very glad you like it. But honestly - it's still an ugly duckling, I barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to do.. Wait till it grows to the whole swan;-) That is, of course, if Don's APIs allow me:-)

Cheers!

Originally Posted by Baldy Ben is not easily impressed and he's been bouncing off the walls here. I watched him using it and will give it a spin myself later today. My impression is it's very powerful but takes a few minutes to figure out how to use it. Overall, an incredibly promising start and boy are people clamoring for what it offers. Thanks! Baldy

Thank you, very nice to hear this!
As to the a tad cumbersome UI - it will all come together. I was trying to cover the basics first. Lots of things are simply not surfaced. Stay tuned!
And thank you once again, your guys' feedback is very inspirational!
Cheers!

Originally Posted by Nikolai http://www.sklobovsky.com/community/smugmug Also modified the original post. Hope it's not too late:-) Thank you!

it looks like the link only works from certain machines. Darn freeserververs (where my account is hosted), do not seem to allow the direct links, at least from some domains. Funny, I can see it ok from work, but from home (different ISP) I get 404..:-(

PLEASE update the link on your reference page to the following:
http://sklobovsky.nstemp.com/community/smugmug/
this guy seem to work from other places, too..

Sorry for the troubles...

Nikolai, this is absolutely and totally AMAZING!

I just set up a huge 283 photo upload in the range of approx 700mb's. I'll let you know how it goes.

If all goes well, this will be a god-send for all Firefox users.

Thanks, again.

Originally Posted by PerezDesignGroup Nikolai, this is absolutely and totally AMAZING! I just set up a huge 283 photo upload in the range of approx 700mb's. I'll let you know how it goes. If all goes well, this will be a god-send for all Firefox users. Thanks, again.

.. and it will be getting better, I promise!
Cheers!

All files, except for 3 that were over 8mb's, uploaded fine. It took several hours but I successfully put 283 photos totaling 700mb+ up in one shot. The nice thing is it kept uploading even though those files were rejected. This is some very fine programming, Nikolai! Thank you.

Originally Posted by PerezDesignGroup All files, except for 3 that were over 8mb's, uploaded fine. It took several hours but I successfully put 283 photos totaling 700mb+ up in one shot. The nice thing is it kept uploading even though those files were rejected. This is some very fine programming, Nikolai! Thank you.

Again - new version will be better:-). Actually, it IS better, but I can't publish it yet - to many loose ends because of the new APIs wrapping..
Stay tuned!
Cheers!

Newest vesrion (396 Kb, single exe in a zip) can be downloaded from here:
http://nik.wyw.ru/download/smugmugex...r_0_0_0_14.zip

Product home page updated:
http://sklobovsky.nstemp.com/community/smugmug/

What's new:

• Massive facelifting
• New or severely updated Account, Options, Album and (rather useful, IMHO) About (F1) dialogs
• Options now allow to control file extensions and sizes. I would not recommend to extend them, but if so is your desire - it's your bandwidth..:-)
• Create Album is now compatible with the latest createAlbum API, which actually works (yay, Don!). Taking into account you can set default settings and also use the "most recently used" ones, as well as you still can create multiple albums in one shot (obviously sharing the same settings), I think it's a pretty nice tool.

Caveats:

• New account settings storage (which is binary and encrypted) is incompatible with the first alpha. You would have to re-enter your settings again, sorry about that. But at least now you can also specify your subscription level:-)
• Although upload and upload via post API were recently updated to incorporate ByteCount and MD5Sum parameters, they don't seem to work all the way. Actually, only upload with a single ByteCount parameter works (thanks rutt!), everything else returns a format error. I notified Don, but so far upload methods in the app only work this way:
  upload - uses ByteCount, so you have some fiile checking (per rutt, this method actually works fine in his script and prevents incomplete uploads)
  upload via post - does not use any new parameters, so no checking is possible, but this method is still faster..

Nearest plans:

• Cache albums/categories locally so you don't have to connect each time
• Upload patch (so you can see, what are you actually uploading:-)
• Album editor - so you can not only create new album(s), but also modify existing one(s!!!! - guess why it's plural here;-)
• Some other very cool things...

Enjoy the new version!

BTW, Nikolai, I highly recommend (per a previous conversation about encryption, etc) that you don't store the users login & password to disk in any form, including 'double encryption'.

Instead, use loginWithPassword once, and store the resulting UserID/PasswordHash and then use loginWithHash for all future logins. If/when it ever fails, then fallback to a dialog box prompting for username & password again (it will only fail if the user has changed their password on smugmug as a security precaution or something).

This provides for extra security in a couple of different ways.

Don

Someone will put all of this wonderful stuff that i have 100% absolutely no comprehension of what-so-ever into a ' clicky button ' at the end ...wont they ?

I'll make the change..
For now just don't send configuration file it to aol accounts:-).

For the record: if anybody can break existing version within, say, 1 hour of work, I'll gladly pay this person $100. Cash. Offer stands valid until next Xmas or until password-less version comes out, whichever comes first, but it's good at least until next Monday noon.

Cheers!

Originally Posted by Humungus Someone will put all of this wonderful stuff that i have 100% absolutely no comprehension of what-so-ever into a ' clicky button ' at the end ...wont they ?

...how "close" you are saying this..:-)
(sh-sh-hh, hope I didn't say it out loud just now:-)

Cheers!

Originally Posted by onethumb BTW, Nikolai, I highly recommend (per a previous conversation about encryption, etc) that you don't store the users login & password to disk in any form, including 'double encryption'. Instead, use loginWithPassword once, and store the resulting UserID/PasswordHash and then use loginWithHash for all future logins. If/when it ever fails, then fallback to a dialog box prompting for username & password again (it will only fail if the user has changed their password on smugmug as a security precaution or something). This provides for extra security in a couple of different ways. Don

I strongly agree.

If for no other reason that the passwords used by people on ecommerce sites are not things that should be dealt with lightly as they are often reused.

Luke

Originally Posted by Nikolai I'll make the change.. For now just don't send configuration file it to aol accounts:-). For the record: if anybody can break existing version within, say, 1 hour of work, I'll gladly pay this person $100. Cash. Offer stands valid until next Xmas or until password-less version comes out, whichever comes first, but it's good at least until next Monday noon. Cheers!

Hey Nikolai,

Always nice to hear someone putting cash against their work.

If it was MSIL I'd gladly take your money [Just kidding there are clever string encryption tricks even in MSIL], but I doubt that I could learn enough about Delphi compilers to stand much of a chance in only an hour ;)

All the best,

Luke

Originally Posted by luke_church Hey Nikolai, Always nice to hear someone putting cash against their work. If it was MSIL I'd gladly take your money [Just kidding there are clever string encryption tricks even in MSIL], but I doubt that I could learn enough about Delphi compilers to stand much of a chance in only an hour ;) All the best, Luke

And it's not only compiler... :-)
But, hey, it will be over, like, tonite..

---(shameless brag)---
Me and my friend wrote a nice text editor once - it was ol' gud' MS DOS 3.x days, we were learning assembler, and actually became quite good at it. So we wrote a little piece (32Kb) in pure assembler, which turned out to be quite capable text editor - lot's of block operations, syntax highlite, formatting - whole nine yards.
It's been in USSR, so we quite naturally expected that our "ed.com" would be "borrowed without our permission". So we put a little protection, kinda similar to what I did in this case, and let it go.. Years later, already in US, I became aware that
1) its "protection" became kinda famous
2) there was a SINGLE fact, when a dedicated guy, running some kind of a monster disassembler tool in a protected mode (rememeber those modes?;-) on i386 managed not to remove the protection, but to bypass it - for that one single debugging session.
Considering our price was $5, I think we did a pretty decent job..
3) at those times I was a university professor teaching, apart from other things, computer science. I held an offer for the semester paper, that if anybody hacks our protection, this person would get A+. God knows, they tried. The whole city tried (kids have parents, parents have friends, you know how it goes). Offer stood for much longer than an hour - I was offering it to each new class I tought. Nobody ever claimed it.:-)
---(/shameless brag)---

Cheers!

Originally Posted by Humungus Someone will put all of this wonderful stuff that i have 100% absolutely no comprehension of what-so-ever into a ' clicky button ' at the end ...wont they ?

Thats kinda what I was thinkin too....

Direct download: [font=Tahoma]http://nik.wyw.ru/download/smugmugexplorer/SmugmugExplorer_0_0_0_22.zip[/font]
Home page updated (some facelifting):
http://sklobovsky.nstemp.com/community/smugmug/

What's new in this version:

• Password is no longer stored (Luke, Don - rejoice!:-). Instead, you'd be greeted with a (nice, I hope) login dialog whenever hashed information is not usable.
• Account settings - test button now works
• regular upload - uses md5 now
  upload via post still does not use it - waiting for the fix
• Save settingas as a default set - confirmation dialog
• Miscellaneous typos fixed.

Enjoy!

Found a test-related issue and reuploaded: same zipfile name, but version is 26 and zip size is 407Kb

Originally Posted by Nikolai Direct download: [font=Tahoma]http://nik.wyw.ru/download/smugmugexplorer/SmugmugExplorer_0_0_0_22.zip[/font] Home page updated (some facelifting): http://sklobovsky.nstemp.com/community/smugmug/ What's new in this version: Password is no longer stored (Luke, Don - rejoice!:-). Instead, you'd be greeted with a (nice, I hope) login dialog whenever hashed information is not usable. Account settings - test button now works regular upload - uses md5 now upload via post still does not use it - waiting for the fix Save settingas as a default set - confirmation dialog Miscellaneous typos fixed. Enjoy!

Nice! The md5sum on POSTed uploads should work fine now, but double-check and see.

FYI, what you're doing now (storing the hash) is exactly like storing a cookie. So you're using standard web browser security practices in your app. What's nice is that if the hash falls into the wrong hands, it won't let them get access to your account settings. (You must actually know your password and login name to get there @ smugmug). This includes changing passwords.

So your app has become more secure as a result, which is a good thing. I should probably explain this better in the API docs, since I'm sure it'll come up again.

Don

Originally Posted by onethumb Nice! The md5sum on POSTed uploads should work fine now, but double-check and see. Don

Just recompiled and tested - still the same error:

PHP Code:

0:00:30:           Multipart Post results
<?xml version='1.0' encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<methodResponse>
<fault>
 <value>
  <struct>
   <member>
    <name>faultCode</name>
    <value>
     <int>4</int>
    </value>
   </member>
   <member>
    <name>faultString</name>
    <value>
     <string>Wrong format.</string>
    </value>
   </member>
  </struct>
 </value>
</fault>
</methodResponse>
0:00:30:           RPC-XML: Wrong format. (4)

Shall I try later, or you need more work?