Other Goodies in HD Video Release
While the addition of HD video is the big news in the latest release, there were lots of other goodies tucked in as well. Play It Again Sam – Or Not. Add multiple songs to the same slideshow, including the option of having different playlists for each album section. You can choose from our stock music or upload your own music. Look Sharp. Phanfare now sharpens photos by default for web presentation. You can control the degree of sharpening applied. We use the unsharp mask algorithm. Sharpening occurs on resize only, so to see the effect on older images, rotate the image and then revert within Phanfare. Orwell

HD Video has Landed at Phanfare
We are delighted to announce the immediate availablity of HD video support for Pro customers. You can now watch your videos in full-screen, HD glory. We are busy reconverting all the videos for web presentation, but if you are eager to see what it looks like, here are some soccer videos and some photos too, taken with the Canon 5D Mark II. This is not professional quality video, but it gets the point across (and probably looks a bit more like what you are going to create at home versus what Hollywood produces). Most computers can’t even show HD video without stuttering unless the hardware presentation is accelerated by

New version of Phanfare Photon – But it’s not all good
There is a new version of Phanfare Photon for the iPhone available in the app store. This version fixes the nasty bug where you get knocked offline because you created an album when your default music pref was null. However, this version also removes our super cool image import flow and replaces it with the default image import picker. That picker forces you to import one image at a time and is much slower. You also can’t choose what album the image goes into. We removed our custom import flow and associated user interface screen at Apple’s request. Apparently, their developer agreement changed and they no longer permit modifying that flow or allowing us to acce

I just cancelled my Zagat subscription. Those guys got Yelped.
I have been a subscriber to Zagat.com for about 10 years. It costs $24.95/year. They provide online access to the information that is in the books. As New Yorkers know, where the guide got its start, The Zagat survey was for a long time the goto book for figuring out where to eat in NYC. They put the ratings together through an annual survey that diners completed. They charged for the book and when they went online, they charged for online access to the same data. Why? Because they did not want to cannibalize the sales of the book. Well, they don’t need to worry about that anymore because I am sure book sales are close to z

Why there should be no limit on the H1B visas allowed
Only last year, all the H1B visa slots available to hire foreigners to work in the US were snapped up in a single day. We hired someone through the program a few years back when tech hiring was tight. It seemed ridiculous that more slots were not made available. The fear in Washington is that tech companies like us were hiring foreigners over US citizens. This could not be further from the truth. We went looking for someone abroad because we could not find someone qualified here. We prefer to hire US citizens. There are no language or cultural barriers to overcome and it does not require an immigration lawyer. Fast forward to today and we find out that the H1B program is