Last month I blogged about a social photo sharing app called Photovine. This app was released almost the same time as Google+ and was created by Slide a company acquired by Google last year. I only got to try out Photovine a few days ago and I really like it. I love Instagram but Photovine provides a different type of experience.

Photovine has a lot of potential and I believe that it can be successful in the social photo sharing market. Unfortunately, we’ll never get to find out because Photovine along with other Slide social apps like Slideshow, SuperPoke! Pets, Video Inbox and Pool Party will be “retired” in the coming months. This was announced yesterday via Slide’s official blog.

We wanted to give you all advance notice that in the coming months, a number of Slide’s products and applications will be retired. This includes Slide’s products such as Slideshow and SuperPoke! Pets, as well as more recent products such as Photovine, Video Inbox and Pool Party. We created products with the goal of providing a fun way for people to connect, communicate and share. While we are incredibly grateful to our users and for all of the wonderful feedback over the years, many of these products are no longer as active or haven’t caught on as we originally hoped.

Most importantly, we wanted to take this opportunity to reassure you that we’re committed to helping our users preserve their data as easily as possible. We recognize that many of you have stored valuable content with us and want to assure you that, wherever possible, you will have ample time to download that information or transfer it to another service.

For example, on Slide.com, we will enable users to either download their photos or export them to a Picasa account. We are working to release this export feature over the coming weeks and, once added, users will have several months to take advantage of transferring their photos.

Thanks again for all of your support, and we appreciate your patience as we continue to share more details in the coming days and weeks on how to access and save your content from specific Slide products. If you have any questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to contact us at feedback@slide.com. Or visit this page for any additional updates.

Anybody else use Photovine or other Slide social apps? Do you think Google’s decision to shut down Slide’s social apps is a good one? Should Google keep Photovine running? Please share your thoughts.

From the theme author:

This is a WordPress 3.0 + compatible theme with a professional slideshow that you can use to display or highlight any of your categories’ posts. This theme also comes with a social sharing bar in the single post view that will help your users easily bookmark the useful articles from your blog. The widgetized sidebar comes with ready to configure feedburner, twitter and facebook icons that can be setup in the theme’s admin options. The thumbnails are auto-generated and use the default thumbnail size that wordpress generates when you upload an image with a post.

Features:

• 2-column
• Widget-ready
• Gravatar-ready
• Threaded comments support
• Built-in social sharing bar
• Auto-generated thumbnails
• Compatible with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome

Screenshots:

SLIDESHOW USAGE/INSTALLATION
1. Activate Dictum theme
2. Go to Appearance > Dictum Options
3. Configure slideshow category
4. Set custom field for each post.
5. Set custom field to “label” (without the quotation marks)

My Take:
The Dictum theme is a simple, clean and professional looking WordPress theme. It has the basic functions/features that most users will need in a theme – widget-ready, gravatar-ready and threaded comments support. Then aside from those basic functions, it also has some extra features like the professional slideshow with auto-generated thumbnails so users won’t have to manually resize photos and the social sharing bar which enables blog readers to easily and quickly bookmark or share content. It also has a very easy to use and configure built-in buttons for RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook.

With it’s simple design and layout, the Dictum theme can be used for different types of blogs – personal blogs, sports blogs, non-profit organization blogs, company blog, small business blog and other special niche blogs.

Dictum is 100% FREE and can be used any way the user pleases as long as the footer credits are kept intact.

Preview or Download the Dictum WordPress theme.

NOTE: This theme was scanned using the Theme Authenticity Checker and doesn’t contain any hidden or encrypted code.

Good news WordPress fans, DevPress is here! It’s a new site where you can get beautiful WordPress themes, functional plugins and useful WordPress tutorials. Launched yesterday, DevPress a collaboration of 4 guys who love WordPress, the community and open source.

The DevPress team is made up of Justin Tadlock, Patrick Daly, Ptah Dunbar and Tung Do. Many of you know Justin Tadlock for his free WordPress themes and plugins and also the Theme Hybrid theme club. Patrick Daly is known for developing free Hybrid child themes. Ptah Dunbar is a core contributor of WordPress and a BuddyPress developer. Tung Do aka Small Potato creator and former owner of WPDesigner.

Here’s an excerpt from the DevPress launch blog post:

What you should know about DevPress is we are figuring this whole thing out. We don’t have a business plan or any hard-and-fast rules about the direction this site is headed in. Instead, we have dreams of what DevPress could eventually become, but at the moment, it’s a melting pot of the team’s collaborative effort. Although the direction is still a bit blurry… we do have one primary goal — to produce the best, highest quality, GPL’d, make you say “wha?!” kinda products. All in that order.

In short, we’re four guys putting in whatever time we have to build plugins/themes that we think are cool.

Today, we’re just building the foundation and not trying to make a big splash in the WordPress pool. DevPress is easing into the waters because it’s much better for us (and you) that we take our time making quality products rather than trying to push several mediocre products out at once.

To celebrate the launch of DevPress, the team have released a free news/magazine styled parent theme for WordPress called News.

News WordPress Theme

Preview or Download the News WordPress theme

Aside from the News WordPress theme, DevPress has also released several free WordPress plugins:

• Clean My Archives – a simple, easy-to-use plugin for creating elegant archives pages of your blog posts. It was created to simplify the process that other archives plugins make more complex than needed.
• Slideshow – a beautifully-designed image slideshow that cycles through image attachments of your blog posts (or any post type) using the jQuery Cycle plugin.
• Members – a complete user, role, and content management system for sites with multiple users. It’s a powerful membership plugin that grants fine-grain control over your WordPress install.

As a WordPress user and advocate, it’s good to see a group of excellent WordPress developers and designers come together and collaborate to bring quality products to the WordPress community. I’m also happy to see Tung Do “officially” back in the WordPress scene.

DevPress is surely a welcomed addition to the WordPress community. Personally, I’m expecting great things from DevPress and looking forward to what they have in store for WordPress and its community. To the DevPress team, congratulations and we wish you all the best!

[via Theme Lab]

Fearless Flyer is a web design blog ran by web designer Michael Soriano that provides design related articles, tutorials, cool freebies and some of his web creations. I came across his blog late last year when I was browsing the Internet for cool WordPress themes. At that time, his most recent release was the Clam Shell WordPress theme. I was planning on reviewing that theme but due to some circumstances, I wasn’t able to write the review and eventually forgot about it.

I came across his blog again a few weeks back and saw that since my last visit, he’s released a few more cool WordPress themes. So I decided to feature and share with you the last 2 free WordPress theme releases from Fearless Flyer – the Pork & Beans and Aparatus WordPress themes.

Porl and Beans WordPress Theme

Features:

• 2 columns
• Widget-ready
• Built-in gravatar support
• Built-in threaded comments support
• jQuery tabs
• Custom comment form
• Auto resizable images
• flickr box

Required Plugins:

• flickrRSS plugin
• Similar Posts plugin

Preview or Download the Pork and Beans WordPress theme.

[You can also download the PSD file]

Aparatus WordPress Theme

Features:

• Magazine style
• 2 column
• Widget-ready
• Built-in gravatar support
• Built-in threaded comments support
• Cufonized fonts
• Homepage slideshow
• 4 custom stylesheets/color schemes
• Author info section
• Social bookmarking section
• Theme options page

Preview or Download the Aparatus WordPress theme.

Both these themes are really well designed and are premium quality not only design-wise but also feature-wise, especially the Aparatus theme. Aside from the premium-quality design and the features/options, what makes the Pork & Beans and the Aparatus WordPress themes awesome is that they’re both FREE!

Kudos to Fearless Flyer and Michael Soriano for releasing beautiful, premium-quality WordPress themes like the Pork & Beans and Aparatus themes to the WordPress community for free. You can follow Fearless Flyer on Twitter if you want to receive updates on the next free WordPress theme releases or other freebies.

These days, its not uncommon to find free premium quality WordPress themes. A lot of WordPress theme authors, design websites and even Premium theme sellers are now creating and releasing freemium WordPress themes and sharing it with the WordPress community. One good example of such a theme is the Milano theme brought to us by Web2Feel. The Milano theme is an advance magazine style, 2-columned theme that has the qualities of a premium theme and lots of built-in features.

Here’s a short description for the Milano theme.

This is an elegant theme designed with attractive color combination for bloggers who look to make money online via ads. This theme is suitable for any niche. The theme layout is stylish and dynamic contents modules like, image slider, tabbed content area are built into it.

List of Features:

• Premium theme layout
• Multi-level dropdown javascript navigation menu
• Featured sliding posts
• Site wide customizable 125 x 125 custom banner ads
• Adsense enabled
• Tabbed content area * Featured Video * Recent posts * Popular Posts
• Two widgetized sidebars
• Customizable welcome message
• Page navigation enabled
• WP 2.7 ready, threaded comments
• Theme support
• Custom theme option page in the admin panel

Screenshot:

My Take:
Like the Monkeypr theme that I reviewed recently, the Milano is hands down a very pretty and well designed WordPress theme and could easily be marketed as a premium theme. It has a lot of features and built-in functions that most free WordPress themes don’t have and can be found only on premium themes.

The feature that stands out the most from the Milano theme is the featured post slideshow. This feature not only enables the author a cool and attractive way to promote the featured posts but it also provides the user easy access to check out the blog’s featured posts. You can configure the slider, video, Adsense and banner ads from within the WP dashboard via the theme options page. It also has features a javascript-powered multi-level drop down navigation menu that is useful when your blog has a lot of categories and sub-categories.

The Milano theme features page navigation, post excerpts and popular posts and in order for it to work, you’ll have to install 3 plugins – WP Page Navi, Popularity Contest and Limit Post. The theme author has included those 3 plugins into the theme download zip file. This theme also uses the TimThumb script to generate the post thumbnails.

So far, I haven’t found anything negative to say about the Milano theme. Maybe the only things that can be an issue for some users are the color scheme and those required plugins, but those can be easily fixed with a few minor tweaks. Other than that, the Milano theme is an awesome theme. It’s very customizable, easy to install, has lots of features and can be used by any blogger and used for any type of blog niche – personal, technology, entertainment, sports, movie reviews, gadgets, etc.

Great job by the theme designer and hope they’d release more free WordPress themes like these in the near future. Btw, the theme author also provided the PSD file for the header logo, so users can customize it to their own preference.

For more detailed installation instructions, check out the Milano Theme Setup Guide.

Preview or Download the Milano WordPress theme.