Flickr Addict
February 10th, 2010, 1:50pm by KelvinNo I’m not referring to any Board member in particular, I’m talking about this week’s WebOS app review! The developer of the app in question is a member of a WebOS group that Jake and I co-administer on Flickr, and Jake promised to write up a review of his app at some point. I thought I could use this post as a sounding board to help generate some ideas that Jake could incorporate. To be upfront, we both love this app, and we think it deserves better than the sub-300 unique downloads that it has achieved to date. Maybe a review on Precentral will generate some interest in this useful app.
Flickr Addict has a simple purpose– it switches your phones wallpaper at scheduled intervals with photos from Flickr. Here’s a screenshot of its App Catalog page:
The implementation is not straightforward though (see comments below).
Here’s an example of a landscape photo as wallpaper.
February 10th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
Sounds like a fine app, should have taken a closer look at it when Jake was here. Can you access family/friends photos on it? For that matter, does it actually log you into flickr (so that you can access private group pools, etc)? How does it scale/crop photos to the right size — will it sometimes cut out interesting stuff around the outside? What about landscape-oriented photos, which are probably >80% of what’s on Flickr (unless taken by a smartphone).
What’s bad about the implementation?
February 10th, 2010 at 5:30 pm
I didn’t mean to say the implementation was bad, just that it isn’t straightforward. I meant to complete the review on the train ride home, but the point I’ll make now is that at first glance, you’d just expect it to go to flickr and grab a random photo every, say, hour, but because the Flickr API doesn’t support randomization, FA actually has to use a special trick whereby once a day (presumeably while on a charger), it downloads information on 10X the number of photos needed, randomly selects 1X, then downloads those locally. After that, it’s only background task is to switch the wallpaper at the intervals specified.
To answer your other questions, FA doesn’t support authentication and therefore only works with public photos. You can point it to a particular set from a particular user, a user’s whole stream, a global tag, or a group/pool (or any combination). As for cropping, you have the options of stretching photos to fit (uggh), or “centering” them, whereby it uses portrait photos full screen and does a square crop of landscape photos (with black bars at the top and bottom). Not ideal, but it’s probably the compromise that I’d choose.
My takehome message is that the Pre’s screen is flat out awesome for photos, with its high pixel density and 24-bit color depth, and it therefore makes for a really nice way to view photos. For me, FA injects a little serendipity; it’s a lot of fun to see a photo that I’d forgotten about just pop up onto my screen.
February 10th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
I think that sounds like a fine way to implement the randomization — and it all happens in the background, anyway, right? So who cares how it works, as long as it’s efficient. I think it’s actually a kind of interesting way to do it.
I would totally use something like Flickr Addict — I have desktops rotate on my laptop (from a folder, not Flickr), but pointing at a Flickr album would give the same effect. I love having changing pictures.
February 10th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
Yeah, I actually thought it was so fun that I bought my parents a wifi photo frame for X-mas that rotates photos with a specific tag from my Flickr stream. Figure that way, they can keep up with Lucas’ exploits. It’s powered by the framechannel service, if anyone is interested.
The downside to using Flickr for this type of thing is that Flickr’s API presents photostreams most recent first and sets in order. So if you have a stream of a thousand photos, Flickr Addict will never sample that deep, and you’ll end up only seeing photos from the last 300 or so.
February 14th, 2010 at 10:52 pm
Just posted the review. I might add more later. I think the best part of the review is the closing quote.
February 18th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Flickr Addict is now up to 682 downloads (vs 504 as of this post), but since an update was released the day of the post, there’s no way to know what the effect of your review was. We do know that the thread has been viewed 406 times, so the potential impact is minimal.
March 16th, 2010 at 5:11 pm
I’m sure you’ve noticed that Flickr Addict hasn’t been working right lately, and apparently, here’s the reason why:
http://www.precentral.net/how-should-background-apps-function