Tristan O’Tierney | Mac Geek

So I know I shouldn’t complain too much, coming from Safari not too long ago, but I felt I must rant about something. In my quest to bring YouTube support to FlickrBooth (is that app name even going to make sense after such a feature?) I’ve come to the sad realization that NSURL sucks. It doesn’t have a feature-rich enough API, making you have to break down to CF functions. It makes you use important to forget string functions like [NSString stringByAddingPercentEscapes] which have fun ways of creating bugs you didn’t anticipate. It lacks any sort of GET/POST automatic query generation. It has no helper functions for cookies, which are this entirely separate-but-shared entity. I feel like Apple ported (or did they write it from scratch?) it on top of WebKit for Panther and basically let it wither without any substantial feature additions since. I suppose on one hand you could argue that it means the API will remain stable, making it easier for future development but Apple does seem to have a hit and run policy of releasing a new awesome library, then basically never touching it again except for bug fixes. WebKit in particular I would not account such harsh words to. The API adapts quite rapidly, despite many additional functions winding up on the “Unofficial but available” headers. But this is by virtue of it’s OpenSource facing policy. AppKit/Foundation doesn’t exactly have the same liberal policy.

So after inviting suggestions the other day about additions to FlickrBooth someone game me a great idea. Photo Booth in Leopard now supports videos, so why not offer direct uploading to YouTube as well? Turns out this shouldn’t be too difficult, so I’ve begun writing a small framework to upload to YouTube as a demo app. Add that to my list of things to release separately as a download. I never did get a chance to post my generic “Photo Booth plugin” example project, but mostly because I need to clean it up some more. After writing the example plugin first, then porting Tiger FlickrBooth to using it I ran into quite a few snags along the way that will necessitate updating the example plugin project. So, that’s on hold for now. I think getting something like YouTube support in the hands of the mac community will be more beneficial though

Head on over to the FlickrBooth page for FlickrBooth 1.2! Obviously features Leopard support, as well as some new automatic tagging for the new “Photo Strips” in Leopard. It also removes those annoying .jpg file extensions on photos so your automatic photo titles will look just a bit more pretty now. I didn’t really add any major features, so if you have requests while I’m interested, now’s the time to ask for them!

I’ll be at MacWorld as a booth (babe) this year! I work on VMware Fusion these days, so stop by and give thanks, suggestions, or if you haven’t used it before come check out a demo and free eval copy of our software. My particular day for manning the booth will be Thursday.

Tonight’s update: An flickrbooth photo! Fresh off the upload. I still have a few more issues to sort out, but things are going well. On another note, since photobooth in leopard now has this “4 photos” strip mode, we need an automatic tag for it. Any ideas? I’m thinking “photoboothstrip”, “flickrboothstrip” or something else semi-unique. It would be nice to be able to search for just one tag to find all 4 photo strip pics. This would be, of course, in addition to the regular automatic flickrbooth tag.

Good news! For those waiting for an update to FlickrBooth, I’ve got all my hooks in photo booth updated. Now I just have to clean up my flickr authentication code (it’s torn apart right now due to some refactoring) and it should work. In the process of all this I’ve created a “PhotoBooth plugin API.” Which I’ll be releasing separately for those interested in writing their on photo booth plugins. Give me another few nights, and I’ll have something to share with everyone.