Yes, but at a price. Internet Explorer has some idiosyncratic ways of rendering scrollbars. Ideally, a vertical or horizontal scrollbar only appears when it is needed, and not otherwise. By default, IE does NOT behave this way! By default, IE will display both a vertical AND horizontal scrollbar when EITHER a vertical or horizontal scrollbar is required. In JAlbum photo albums, since vertical scrollbars are often needed, this creates the annoying presence of an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar.

There is a workaround for this which BluPlusPlus implements. In the CSS file (the style file), the html selector has its overflow-x property given the value ‘auto’ while the overflow-y property is omitted entirely (see the arc.css file listing). This makes the horizontal and vertical scrollbars appear/disappear when they should. However, the “phantom vertical scrollbar” is an undesirable byproduct.

If one prefers to suppress the “phantom vertical scrollbar” and live with a horizontal scrollbar when it is not needed, add ‘overflow-y:auto;’ to the style files (see here for more information about altering style files).

Hopefully, Microsoft will fix this bug in Internet Explorer.

This problem usually occurs because the amount of text in the top bar is greater than what easily fits without creating a horizontal scrollbar. There are two ways to resolve this issue:

• Shorten the album title and other text that appears in the top bar.
• Use the text truncation feature to force BluPlusPlus to truncate long tob bar texts

With the release of Java version 1.4.2 and Mac OS 10.3.5, the watermark feature should work correctly. If you have an older version of either Java or the Mac OS, see below.

As of Java version 1.4.1, it is not possible to control the opacity of the watermark on a Mac (the Java implementation somehow broke this). If one really wants an semi-transparent watermark, it is possible to force JAlbum to use an earlier version of Java. See this post on the JAlbum forum. Note that everytime a new version of JAlbum is installed, this fix will need to be repeated.

Both Mac OS X and Windows XP have a “feature” called “extension hiding”. This feature is designed to spare novices the need to worry about file name extensions and help avoid difficulties caused by accidently changing a file name extension.

Unfortunately, this can cause problems with the custom movie icon feature. If extension hiding is enabled (it is enabled by default), a file called ‘niceicon.jpg’ will appear to the user to be called only ‘niceicon’, and when the suffix ‘.thumb’ is added per the instructions, the actual file name becomes ‘niceicon.thumb.jpg’, although to the user it appears that the filename is ‘niceicon.thumb’.

To get around this problem, follow the instructions for your operating system:

• Mac OS X—Click once on the custom movie icon file. Select ‘Get Info’ from the File menu. Be sure that the ‘Hide extension’ check box is NOT checked. Rename the file by editting the file name in the box. Close the ‘Get Info’ dialogue box.
• Windows XP—Open the folder containing the custom movie icon file. Select ‘Folder Options’ from the ‘Tools’ menu and click on the ‘View’ tab. Be sure that the ‘Hide extensions for know file types’ check box is NOT checked. Click ‘OK’ and rename the file per the instructions.

JAlbum will process files with filetypes specified in ‘filetypes.xml’ (found in the JAlbum program directory). This results in albums with “thumbnail images” and “slide images” that are not images at all, but are other types of files. By editing ‘filetypes.xml’ JAlbum can process additional file types.

JAlbum knows not to treat certain other files as images, such as ‘header.inc’, ‘footer.inc’. For some types of files, such as audio files, background image (‘wallpaper’) image files, and any other file that can be processed via the meta.properties file, one can begin the file name with an period (‘.’); JAlbum never treats files or folders that begin with ‘.’ as images. Note that Mac users cannot begin filenames with a period. See this FAQ for more information.

‘filetypes.xml’ is a JAlbum file (located in the JAlbum program folder) that lists the filetypes that JAlbum will recognize and process. Any file with an extension not listed in ‘filetypes.xml’ will be ignored. ‘filetypes.xml’ also associates each file type with an icon.

To add an additional filetype to a kind of file already contained in ‘filetypes.xml’, add a line of the form <ext>extension</ext> to the bottom of an existing list of filetypes within ‘filetypes.xml’ .

To add a completely new filetype, add the following lines to the bottom of ‘filetypes.xml’ right above the ‘</filetypes>’ tag:

<type name="filetype description" icon="icon filename">
    <ext>extension</ext>
</type>

If you are using a new icon to associate with this filetype, be sure to place the icon file in the JAlbum ‘res’ folder (NOT the BPP ‘res’ folder!)

Yes. There are two ways of accomplishing this:

• 
  JAlbum’s Advanced-General tab has an ‘ignore pattern’, which accepts a “regular expression” defining the filenames JAlbum is to skip. By default, BluPlusPlus skips files beginning with ‘.’ (dot, or period), or‘_’ (underscore); it also ignores files with extension ‘mp3’, ‘wav’, ‘wma’, ‘rm’, and ‘mid’. Thus, the easiest way to have a file not processed is to begin the file name with dot or underscore, or have the file have one of the extensions specified above.
• JAlbum’s main window allows one to include or exclude individual files and/or folders by right-clicking (ctrl-clicking on a Mac) the image or folder and selecting ‘include’ or ‘exclude’ from the contextual menu. The ‘albumfiles.txt’ should be saved to the top level album input folder.