Tristan O’Tierney | Mac Geek

Well, something I had suspected and maybe secretly known for awhile was in the works landed yesterday! Flickr Video! This is a natural feature addition to FlickrBooth that I’ll eventually be supporting. I don’t have much time these days and lets face it, FlickrBooth being free isn’t much of a cashcow. Is this feature something people really want? Put your money where your mouth is and donate! I’m not saying I won’t do this without donations or that I’m holding my FlickrBooth users hostage, but I certainly up the priority of work based on the interest of my users. I’d be interested to hear what sort of feature(s) surrounding the new addition you guys would like. Should uploading videos allow going to YouTube and Flickr at the same time? What if the video is over 90 seconds, should I clip at 90 seconds or split it into X number of videos? (The latter might actually be pretty tricky…). As an aside, I’ve also tossed around the idea of FlickrBooth for the iPhone, especially with some big names asking for it.

Hot on the heels of my recent ObjectiveYouTube release, I bring you two for one! ObjectiveYouTube 0.2 for developers and FlickrBooth 2.0 for users. As you can probably guess, the big new feature for this release is YouTube uploading of videos. YouTube videos are big, and take awhile to upload? No problem! I’ve also added a handy little upload progress window to view the status of your YouTube uploads as well as the ability to cancel them should you change your mind :). To top it all off, FlickrBooth now automatically checks for updates. Head on over to the download page and give it a spin.

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!

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.

So you upgraded to Leopard and FlickrBooth no longer works? There are a few reasons, but the basic one is Input Managers (a service offered by Mac OS X) are severely limited in Leopard. Long story short my plugin is loaded as an “Input Manager” and thusly takes over PhotoBooth, allowing me to put in my own buttons, menus, etc. So my answer to any questions that may soon arise is yes I am aware it doesn’t work, and I’ll work on a solution but it’s hard to say how soon the fix will be published. It depends on how bad my work and class schedule is, which is to say, hectic. It’s likely I’ll have time to look at it as we get closer to Thanksgiving week when I’ll have some free time.

So apparently FlickrBooth is becoming a anti-thief plugin! When people install it, thieves don’t really know that the snapshot is going to wind up visible to the whole world. The last time this happened I didn’t mention much about it because a lot of folks thought it was a hoax. Then others said it wasn’t. There seems to be a lot less controversy this time around however. Globe and Mail a Canadian news site has the story.

I released a point update to FlickrBooth today. Minor changes mostly (few bug fixes) but the big ones people will appreciate are:

• I now use a tokenfield for the tag input fields
• The name of the selected photo booth effect can be automatically added as a tag

The “add current effect” tag is my favorite, because now you can search by flickrbooth + effectname to find all flickrbooth photos with say, the glow effect.