Flickr Coverflow

September 18, 2007

Apple did had a great vision buying Coverflow from SteelSkies. It is impressive and very user-friendly for managing images. Now imagine this for Flickr Images! Here you go… “Wooow…” you say.

Well I had this idea a while ago and I tried to do it with Javascript. I used my favorite JS library Prototype and as I don’t have much free time, I used Reflex.js for the coverflow effect.

I then wrote a simple Python cgi file to fetch the images from you flickr account and a javascript file to go through them. Nothing special. You might want to check out the final result.

Well, I believe this can be improvable, maybe making it easy to access other photos than yours (if you know the API is pretty simple) and add more than 3 photos (reflex.js limitation) so we can experience full effect (this might be a little more complex). I am also using the thumbnails from flickr because I want them to be fixe-size square, but using Python ou PHP+GD, we could make it work using larger images.

If you feel like working on this, talk to me and feel free to use the source code for any purpose.

Tagged with: en, coverflow, python, javascript, flickr, prototype, reflex, release
This post has 2 comments. Feel free to read them and leave your own.

Bruno Figueiredo
Well, the main advantage of CoverFlow is that it is a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) that -as the name implies - allows for quick browsing through a large stack of information. It builds upon our brains ability to recognize images within a 50 milisecond timeframe. So the buttons you implemented kind of break the quick browsing behaviour. Can you do something to improve them? A slider works best.

Alcides Fonseca
Well, I forgot to mention that. One thing I tried to do, but did not succeed was making the images clicable (the side ones to center, and the main one to go to it's flickr page). It seemed that the canvas element did not support onclick. If you know a way go get around this, I am your listener.

Comment:

Author:
Email:
Website:
Comment:

About

I used to write in this blog, but I've found a better format to express myself. From now on, you may read my writings on ideas, programming and politics on my new wiki.

hCard

Name: Alcides Fonseca
Email:
MSN:
Gtalk:
Nov 24, 1988 40.197958, -8.408312

Tagcloud

Archives

Other links