| flickr SlideShow lite ( because my grandmother has dialup ) |
about new slide show |
This was an interesting project. I was able to meet my goal of making my wife and grandmother somewhat happy. We'll see what happens with the class. I learned after finishing that her dial-up connection was so slow that it took ~ 12 seconds to download a 20k image. So this was an uphill battle. In the end I think we'll chip in and get her broadband.
As for the technical side of things, I was disappointed by the need for a proxy service to get info from Flickr. I like the way the slide show turned out, and I'm hoping someone will host it so it sticks around when I graduate. Perhaps Flickr?
The one thing I learned is just how powerful JavaScript and a REST API can be. I didn't used to give JavaScript much credit, but its a very powerful language. A little bit of care has to be put into making browser code work on Firefox and Internet Explorer, but overall, development went well. The use of XML as a response format in REST makes it trivial to interact with.
One last thing. If I had more time I'd have extended the slide show to support slide shows by tags, interestingness (see flickr), groups, people's photo streams, etc. Most of the work is already done in the slide show.html JavaScript. It needs only be added as an option on the slide show creation page (index.html) to make it function in that regard. My plan is to make this a Sourceforge project and see if anyone is interested in extending it.
Well, thats all, if you'd like to read more, check out the about document.
- Paul