You may have noticed that in Gallery 3 we're tightening the scope of the product considerably. We're setting our laser focus on our most common users, those who will benefit the most from our hard work. But this means that some set of our users will always feel sad and abandoned that we're not creating the features that they want or supporting the platform that they use. We hear you, and we're switching to GitHub to try to help you be successful too. Check out our new repository on the web at http://github.com/gallery and read more to learn all the details...

It's here, the latest technology preview for Gallery 3. In the last 6 weeks we've been busy fixing bugs and adding features. The original plan called for us to have a beta release by now, but that's taking a little longer than expected so we'd like to share the Alpha 4 release with you now so that you can continue to play with the product and give us your feedback. In a hurry? download it now!

The Gallery project has been selected as one of 10 open source projects that will get help from a usability student from June through August 2009. Applications from interested students are accepted until May 20. More information is available at http://season.openusability.org/index.php/projects. This year, we are interested in learning more about our users, so possible projects include user research activities such as surveys, interviews, creating user groups and personas, and competitive analysis.

More specifically, we'd like to accompany the release of Gallery3 with a thorough user survey that would help us get a better feel for who our users are, what they use Gallery for, and how Gallery 3 compares to earlier versions of Gallery (and other products) from a user's perspective.

The resulting data will be a huge help in further step-by-step improving the user experience of Gallery after the release of Gallery3. As a student in this program, your job would be to design, set up, and run the survey and analyze the received data. Additionally, this process should be reusable for future iterations of Gallery.

If you have any questions or feedback about this, or would like to apply to work on this project, please let use know!

Today the Amahi team announced the availability of "one-click" application installation for Linux. Gallery 2 is among the first applications available on Amahi, and you can watch a screencast to see how easy it is to install Gallery 2 through Amahi.

To learn more about Amahi visit http://www.amahi.org. If all goes as planned, they'll have a Gallery 3 "one-click" installation on Amahi as soon as Gallery 3 is here.

Microsoft is making some big announcements today, introducing The Microsoft Web Platform along with their Web Platform Installer, and the Web Application Gallery. What does this have to do with Gallery, an open-source PHP application?

Installing PHP applications on Microsoft IIS on Windows has always been a bit more complex than installing them on a LAMP server, and most Gallery developers do their work on Linux systems running Apache which makes it hard to focus on the Windows side of things. Microsoft's announcements today make things much simpler for people using Windows servers to use Gallery, so we're excited to be included as part of their launch event. Read on for the details.

Four weeks ago we released Gallery 3.0 Alpha 2 and we're happy to say that the response continues to be overwhelmingly positive. The community support and feedback about features that you'd like to see in the product has been outstanding, and you've helped us track down many issues large and small in the code. To encourage your continued support and patience we're releasing Alpha 3 which has significant improvements!