Alembic Lab's Visionae Dei (Lat: "visions of God") takes its name from Nicolas of Cusa's De visione dei, a Renassance-era work on mystical vision. There is ambiguity in the work as to whether it is the mystic who has "the vision of God" or through his mind's journey begins to see what God sees.
Galleries have always been a fixture of the web, but they entailed the following (pick any two):
- They are cumbersome to maintain
- They require lots of specific, ad hoc coding
- They require multiple pagination (thumbnails, separate HTML files, etc.)
Even with the advent of Flash, updating a dynamic gallery to include new pictures or update thumbnails usually required having to change and re-export your files. Until now.
Alembic Laboratories' Visionae Dei toolkit brings god-like control to the developer, while making the process of updating a gallery and the captions quick and easy for the maintainers of the online gallery.
Utilizing AJAX technology, the visitor can click between images and get instantaneous updates, without having force them to load all the images and captions up front, or worry about multiple thumbnail and full-sized versions.
As failsafes, much of Visionae Dei can work with or without PHP, (and the PHP component will work even without Javascript enabled). The developer can code the gallery instance once, and the Visionae package will automatically create thumbnails, manage sizes, and keep track of the number of images in a set.