qotd

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:03 -1000

<davej> so mountain dew have made a huge fuck up.
<davej> they marketed this drink to me as 'game fuel'. but it tastes distinctly like 'ass fuel'

announcing MobilePushr

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 04:18 -1000

When I first heard that the iPhone had a camera built-in, as well as WiFi, those two features triggered the following thought:

It would be really hot if you could upload the pictures from the camera directly to Flickr.

When I got my iPhone, I figured out a workflow that I could use to post pictures from the phone to my Flickr account, but it ~~totally sucked balls~~ was less than optimal. For each picture I wanted to upload, I had to open the picture in the Photos app and email it to a special address that Flickr had associated with my account.

Negatives of this approach? Impossible to use for more than a couple of images at a time, primarily, but also, annoyingly, the Mail app on the iPhone scales and recompresses the JPEG images before sending - and it strips them of their EXIF data, too.

So I was mildly displeased, but there was a way I could get it to work, kinda.

Then the iPhone got cracked wide open. People started figuring out how to write third-party apps and get them installed on their iPhones, and - to be honest - the UI for it, via Installer.app, is - even though it's not from Apple - better than anything I've seen on any other mobile phone, ever.

The Friday before last (September 7th), I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands. Finally learn Objective C. Start writing my dedicated "Push all of the images in my Camera Roll to Flickr, right now dammit" application. And I got a pretty good start! Got the toolchain to build working iPhone apps, and that only took a few hours. Started reading through Flickr's API documentation. Started implementing some functions that didn't require authorization to call - learning how to use Flickr's REST API, basically. Once the first couple of unauthenticated calls worked and did what I expected, I knew it would only be a matter of time before I had my app working.

And then someone pointed me to iFlickr.

My first thought was "Dammit, somebody beat me to it." And I was a little depressed for a bit.

I downloaded it and tried to get it working. No offense to the iFlickr devs, but they clearly didn't put a lot of thought into the user experience (or if they did, I posit that their ideas about "good user experience" work completely differently from mine). I didn't end up getting it to work, but it's open-source, right?

Naturally, my next thought: "Well, I've been working on mine, and this doesn't really do what I wanted. But... maybe I can steal some of their code at least!"

And then I looked at the code.

My eyes still burn a little bit from that. That ... that was not a good idea. I've had much better ideas in the past.

I worked on this for the next few nights, realized that I could completely avoid the messy minitoken crap by using the "Desktop app" authentication mode from Flickr, deleted all of my code that dealt with mini-tokens, and the other night, I finally got it to actually upload pictures to my Flickr account. (My friend Cliff's help was so valuable as to be incalculable.)

I'll post more technical details later, but the important thing is: MobilePushr is out. The UI is going to get a lot of love in the next few days, because the current one doesn't provide nearly enough feedback, but as of right now, MobilePushr lets me do something that I've wanted for almost three months.

I can push my JPEGs directly from my iPhone to my Flickr account with the push of a single, giant red button. (And so can you! If you go download it and install it on your iPhone, that is. Assuming you have an iPhone.)

Also, of course, MobilePushr is Open Source / Free Software, released under the GPLv2. If you use git, you can look at my code by cloning git://mg8.org/MobilePushr and poking around.

The really awesome thing about all of this is that, through Flickr, I can see how many people have given my app permission to link to their account, and in the first twelve hours alone over a thousand people have activated support for MobilePushr on their Flickr accounts.

I don't even have words to describe how awesome that makes me feel.

qotd

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:09 -1000

<ajax> it's like kicking a puppy
<ajax> ... in that's it's really fun

Chris Lee

qotd

announcing MobilePushr

qotd