This update is long overdue.
I had imagined, after the release of Backlight 6, I would quickly follow up with an update adding Juxtapose support to Kookaburra, and have it done and out well before Christmas. Well, that didn't happen.
Getting Juxtapose to work in albums was not particularly difficult, but getting it into blogs and essays turned out to be very difficult, and pushed the timeline into January. I ended up having to further build out the API for custom essay presentations, took a few wrong turns, course corrected, and finally had things mostly working a little more than a week ago. But not completely working, which is what I needed.
Turns out, Juxtapose is old. Like, hasn't had an update in more than ten years old. And that's been fine for Pangolin, because the two have been palling around together for a while. But it didn't work for Kookaburra, in the springtime of its life.
Fortunately, not all of my work was wasted. I was able to repurpose a lot of it to quickly implement a newer solution, and Kookaburra now includes a new Image Comparison presentation mode in albums, blogs and essays.
Here it is:
And while it took way too long, and way too much effort for me to get here, the silver lining is that this new implementation really is better than rusty, old Juxtapose. Therefore, worth it.
To get started, edit your Kookaburra Page template, and enable the new Image Comparison presentation.
Enjoy!
But wait, there's more!
This update also includes new options for automatic playback in Kookaburra's Carousel presentation, including more obvious controls for slide duration, and a new control for the timing of slide transitions.
We have also improved our options for displaying thumbnails in album sets for protected albums. A new option allows you to display cover images for protected albums when a cover image has been explicitly set, while preventing display of thumbnails from within the album when a cover image is NOT set. This prevents private images being shown to the public, while giving you the option to choose an appropriate thumbnail for public viewing.
As before, you can assign cover images to albums within Backlight's Publisher section.
There are other minor fixes in this release as well, I'm sure, though I haven't kept good enough notes to tell you what those improvements are at this point. Bug fixes, and some cleanup to the designer UI, I think. Maybe some other stuff.
But I really hope you enjoy the new Image Comparison feature in Kookaburra. The image comparison feature was always nice to have in albums, but I think it really shines in blogs and essays!