February 12, 2010
Elegance updated to 1.2
Timothy Armes has just released version 1.20 of his Elegance web engine for Lightroom.
Version 1.20 offers a few bug fixes, but the most interesting change could be prove to revolutionise the distribution of Web Engines in general – Elegance is now distributed as a Lightroom plugin.
Traditionally Lightroom Web Engines have been treated as second class citizens. In comparison to plugins, which are installed and managed easily using Lightroom’s plugin manager, the installation of web engines has been a little ‘old-fashioned’, requiring the user to create a specific folder on his or her file system and then copy the Web Engine inside that.
Lightroom doesn’t afford Web Engines the same degree of flexibility as plugins either. The most obvious disadvantage is that updates have to be done manually since there’s no convenient way for a web engine to check for updates automatically.
Timothy decided to use his experience developping Lightroom plugins to circumvent these issues. Distrubuted as a plugin, Elegance is now installed using Lightroom’s plugin manager. The plugin then handles the installation of the Web Engine on the user’s behalf, provides easy access to the user’s registration and also checks for updates automatically. It’s really a very ‘Elegant’ solution (pun intended).
This isn’t the first time that Timothy’s squeezed an extra mile out of Lightroom’s plugin support. When export plugin support was first added to Lightroom 1.3 he quickly thought well outside the box to create the very popular LR/Enfuse – a plugin used to blend multiple exposures together directly from within Lightroom – thereby providing a service that didn’t seem to have anything to do with exporting at all…
You can learn more about Elegance from here: