Shift8 Creative Graphic Design and Website Development

I'm pleased announce, after a few days of really focused work, I've released a new version of Agile Uploader. For those who haven't seen it before, it's a Flash client side resize before upload, multiple file upload tool. Why another multiple file upload tool? Well, swfupload and flash file uploader and uploadify and plupload and all the others (too many to mention) work great and all (and believe me, their authors do a great job and it's not easy and the tools do work well), but they didn't quite do what I needed. First off, several of those I just mentioned don't have client side resizing for image file types. What I mean by that is Flash can scale and re-encode new jpeg files that can then be uploaded to your server rather than having your server do the resizing. Obviously this helps with hosting costs, site scalability, and for those using shared hosting. Second, Agile Uploader is fairly lean and extremely customizable. Agile Uploader allows you to customize how things look and function with regard to what type of files you allow and how you want it to resize images (if at all).

Agile Uploader asynchronously resizes and encodes images so you can keep attaching more files while it's working. The tool has a bunch of other options as well as a tight communication with JavaScript. I wrote a jQuery plugin to accompany the tool, but you could write your own JavaScript should you choose (or alter the jQuery plugin). Flash will pass to a defined JavaScript function various event data as it does its job. In fact, you can control just about every facet of the upload tool right from JavaScript. The only thing you can't use JavaScript for is the "browse" or "attach" button, it's against ActionScript's security rules sadly. However, you can customize the button that appears in the swf by specifying the path to your own image(s). You can also send the form via JavaScript if you wanted to automatically or on some event (like a button or link click). 

Documentation for this new version is on the way, there's been a lot of changes since version 2.x. It's become a lot more organized and simplified now. One of the long awaited features includes the ability to select multiple files at the same time. While the tool always uploaded multiple files at the same time, the user had to click the button to browse for each file one at a time. So the user experience has improved quite a bit along with a few minor bug fixes. 

You can see more about this tool, and a working demo, on the Agile Uploader project page.