MobileMe Gallery Widgets - 3 Curious Questions

Question

Have created and published an iWeb site which basically consists of one page, onto which I’ve positioned six MobileMe Gallery widgets. In the window for each of those widgets I’ve selected a particular MobileMe Gallery published from Aperture, each of which already has one particular image designated as its Key Photo.
So now what’s left -- and what I’ve searched extensively but still can’t figure out -- is:
1) How do I turn OFF the automatic “slideshow preview” going on inside each of those six Gallery Widgets, and make it so they each display only the Key Photo for that Gallery (at least until the user mouses over a particular widget, activating the scrub/scan feature to manually preview all the images contained in that Gallery)?
2) How do I set each widget window to “fit” all the preview thumbs inside its dimensions, rather than arbitrarily hacking off the tops and bottoms of all the vertically-oriented images, which for many shots just looks arbitrary, amateurish, and really ugly?
3) What is the current status of that ridiculous bug which didn’t allow the Gallery Widget to display a Gallery which had been published using the “Hide album on my Gallery home page” option? I do ultimately need to have that option checked, but have left it unchecked for now just to make sure the iWeb site containing the widgets would actually publish.
So -- have the iWeb people and the MobileMe people FINALLY got this bug fixed, or do I still need to hold off activating that “Hide album...” option, and just let my professional Galleries be all mixed together with my personal ones? (Which again just looks arbitrary and amateurish, and encourages one to check out third-party solutions -- at least until such time as the different programming groups at Apple decide to actually talk to each other, and make programs which can interact in truly fluid, intuitive, and meaningful ways.)
My 2¢ -- on top of 3 questions. Any advice or suggestions greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
John Bertram
Toronto

Answer 1

Old Toad wrote:
John:
#1 - are you referring to the "skimming" of photos as you move the cursor over the gallery? That's javascript controlled I believe and would require knowledge of javascript and widgets. You might ask Cyclosaurer as he's the resident expert on javascript and widgets.
No, no, no -- I'm fine with the skimming, in fact I like that feature. I'm talking about the fact that EACH of the six different MobileMe Gallery widgets, from the moment I dragged each one onto the iWeb page I was creating and selected which already-published Gallery it should link to, began showing each of the different images contained in that Gallery/Album, changing to the next one every second or two. This happened completely on its own, I did not (at least not intentionally) select or activate anything, and it happens in ALL the widget windows, even though the mouse is not skimming over ANY of them.
It continues (again, in every widget window, and completely on its own) when I save the page, it continues when I publish the page, it continues when I visit the page online. The only thing which does stop it -- temporarily -- is when I do mouse over a particular widget window and manually skim. But the moment I stop skimming, this "automatic slideshow preview" (I don't know what else to call it) kicks back in.
Is this normal? Or is this some weird aberration peculiar to my system?
The added annoyance is that when you click on one of the widgets, instead of going to that Gallery in its full album view, it goes to a single frame view of whichever image happened to be being displayed at the time you clicked, requiring the user to then click on the "Back to Album" button in the upper left to get their bearings. Which again makes me wonder -- is this normal?
#2 - Again, you're referring to the skimming, right? Since it's a square shape the photos would have to be square to be able to be scaled exactly. Since it's only a "skim" of what's inside being perfectly scaled isn't that necessary.
It certainly wouldn't be as annoying if I could switch off this "automatic slideshow preview" behaviour as described above. (Though even for the skim function, I still think it would make sense to have the option to have the images auto scale to fit completely within the widget window -- which is not square, by the way -- or at least on my system appears to only be sizeable as a horizontal rectangle, to a maximum size of 320x260 pixels. This orientation works fine for previewing horizontally-oriented images, but looks butt-ugly when completely decapitating various groups of people in vertically-aligned shots, of which I happen to have many.)
In any case, if an auto-scale option to fit all image preview thumbs within the widget window (even for mere skimming) is something I need to add to my Feature Request list, that's fine. It's this bizarre, completely on its own "automatic slideshow preview" behaviour I'm still trying to understand.
#3 - it still exists. If you don't want it to be displayed in your overall MMe gallery with the rest of the individual galleries Apple isn't letting it be published alone.
Just to make sure we're talking about the same bug, in an ideal world I DON'T want these particular Gallery/Albums to be displayed as part of my overall MMe Gallery page, but I DO want them to be the designated content of the MMe Gallery WIDGETS which I'm including on the specific iWeb page in question. And if this bug still has not been fixed, then it appears I and many others are still S.O.L. for what should be a simple and obvious bit of formatting.
Send your 2¢ worth to apple via http://www.apple.com/feedback/iweb.html. We're just users like yourself and can't do anything about it.
Rest assured I will. What's one more page after the hundreds I've already sent them?
I'm just a bit stunned that this particular bug hasn't been dealt with already. And it only reinforces my firm belief (see the thread at
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1996786&tstart=0)
that Apple desperately needs an Inter-App Czar, someone with the carte-blanche power to literally FORCE different programming teams to make all Apple apps not only play nicely together, but to play intelligently and intuitively and creatively together!
jb