After a slight panic during the week, all the Flickr tools hosted here on mentalaxis are now working fine again...
I'd managed to neglect checking the latest news about the Flickr API and missed the notice informing the developer community about an upcoming change of server for Flickr API calls.
I realise that many of you would have been a bit confused (angry?) when your badgr installs stopped working, and I'm very sorry I wasn't prepared for the update, if you're using a downloaded .SWF of badgr or badgr2.0 you can download the updated one from the link below.
Thanks again to everyone who's using badgr.
By the way, if you missed my recent announcement, badgr2.0 is now configured to work with FlashPlayer 8 and up, this is in preparation for the new image size updates which are being developed at the moment, there's a tech demo here.
August 26th, 2006
Badgr2.0 and Polkr are now working again.
idFindr
idFindr and the integrated idFindr in Constructr are still not working but a fix is in the pipeline and should be online again soon.
August 24th, 2006
This is a brief post for anyone who’s wondering why Badgr, idFindr, Polkr and Constructr aren’t working
For some reason all of the mentalaxis flickr applications are being refused connection to Flickr servers.
I am working hard in an attempt to find out the details of this problem and get it fixed as soon as possible, I have recieved no word from Flickr or any other notification, so I’m still trying to find out why this has happend.
I would hope that the problems are all solved in the next 48 hours.
More details as I get them, and please accept my apologies.
August 24th, 2006
If you've experienced a problem with badgr you can now help us catch it and fix it.
There's now a project page for Badgr on Google code where you can keep an eye on the progress of badgr development.
August 23rd, 2006
Just incase you've not seen badgr yet, here's the obligatory introduction before I ramble on about where it's going...
Badgr is a very cool web-badge which displays Flickr photos from users, photosets, groups and tag searches, it's got customisation features up the wazoo and it's in continuous development and here's the important bit, it's free and carries no advertising. Take a look at it and play about with it here... Badgr2.0
So what's next for badgr, there has been an awful lot of work done on it and a fair bit of discussion, considering it's only been around for just over a month, it's getting a fair bit of attention. Seeing it refered to in a completely glib fashion on a Venture Capital blog was an eye opener ... and generally being well praised, I'm sure it's a very happy little web badge.
So, back to my original question, what is coming up for badgr? The construction kit or as I've started to call it Constructr, in a bit of tongue in cheek branding, is feeling like an essential compliment to badgr, and as long as I can keep it simple to use I think additional functionality in badgr can go as far as possible. One major request that I've had a fair bit is for larger images to be used, well I think this is probably going to happen now. The first major change that I need to make sure people are aware of is that badgr2.0 is now built for FlashPlayer 8 (and no longer FlashPlayer 7) this is a choice I've made based on a few things, for one Flash8 and upward seems to account for 100% of my site visitors, and public stats from Adobe seem to reflect that Flash 8 and up have been adopted at a fantastic rate. Secondly, the larger image features that people are asking for are only really possible with Flash 8 and thirdly there is a pretty decent performance increase in Flash8 over Flash7.
Why not move it to Flash9? Well, since this it looks like badgr is appearing in a few thousand blogs already, the knock on effect of adopting Flash9 would mean a fairly high failure rate. since putting badgr in a MySpace page (and the like) is done using the embed tag without any flash detection.
Aside from the FlashPlayer change, badgr will soon be able to work with a RSS2.0 based photo feed, this is reliant on the image size features I mentioned earlier... so let's have a look at what these new image size features will allow.
It took a while to work out how this would work well, and it adds another layer of configuration for someone putting badgr on their page, but you pays your money and you takes your choice, firstly the photos recieved from a feed can be of any size, when they are loaded badgr will work out their size and orientation (portrait or landscape) and perform a simple centralised crop, much like flickr does for it's 75x75 square images. This is a very quick operation so cpu overhead doesn't seem to be a problem, memory should also be fine, but lots of images at 500px square and upwards might be a bad idea... (one for me to remember when I get around to the user guide!) ... The user will also setup the size of the grid images as well as the rows and columns (that we can already customize) so, for example the current badgr grid image size is a 38px square, you'll be able to set any size you like, and this could mean some ugly badgr's out there, but whatever, it's your choice. You'll also be able to set the size of the zoomed image. Badgr will take the downloaded image and strecth or shrink the bitmap to fit these two sizes, this is good because it gets around switching from one image (the 75x75) to the user defined larger image. My initial experiments have shown that the photo's will look good enough as long as they aren't streched too much larger than the original.
The other features which will be opened up for editing will be more control over the animation style of the photos, from the time it takes to fade an image in or out, to the extent to which it can fade, other animation features like the easing style could easily be opened up for user control too, I may even add features like bluring images in and out as they move to and from the grid to their zoom spot.
The other large task to complete is the documentation, on the technical side all the variables which are passed to badgr need to be described fully, most of what badgr does is described here and there already within it's blog category, but obviously a decent summary and some helpful images would be good. (this is starting to sound like a large "note to self")
Generally I'll just continue working on badgr and it's contruction kit and add any improvements I can come up with, and as I always say, if you have any bright ideas as to how badgr could be better let me know.
As far as other flickr projects are concerned I thnk there is a genuine gap for something a little like Flappr / Bananr combined as long as it's super slick, so perhaps there will be something called slidr & sortr coming up soon, who knows. A complete flash / flex based front-end for flickr could be quite cool ;)
August 23rd, 2006
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