Yoink simplifies and improves drag and drop on your Mac by providing a temporary place to store your files so you can freely navigate to the actual destination of your files without having to keep the mouse button pressed.
(I apologize for the delay with this post, I had to work on updates for Yoink, ScreenFloat and Briefly and of course lots of work happened on flickery š ).
To finally continue with my promised series of blog posts about flickery 2.0ās development, here I am back with: Uploading.
A minor disclaimer before we start: Any interface you see below isnāt anything near final, subject to change, etc etc.Ā
If there is one part thatās integral to any flickr client, it has to be uploading. So with 2.0, I want to make darn sure that itās the best you can get.
Letās dive in!Ā
In flickery 1.x, uploading blocked the entire app so you couldnāt do anything else but wait. Sure, you got a beautiful sheet window to look at with the currently uploading image slowly transitioning from blurry to focused representing the upload progress, but it wasnāt very user-friendly.
I wanted to change that with 2.0, so now uploads will be in the background, in the app-wide Activities panel where you can track the progress and potential errors of Up- and Downloads.
Itās out of the way, you can close it and leave it running in the background (and of course the little image also transitions from blurry to focused š ). When the activity (Up- or Download) is finished, youāll get an OS X notification letting you know the activity is done.
Another advantage of background uploads is that you can queue them up. You can begin one Upload and while that is running work on the next. And when you start that one, it will wait for any previous Uploads to finish and then begin uploading.
Adding to Photosets or Groups for uploads is not very straightforward in flickery 1.x for Uploads. You canāt assign photosets right from the Upload view but have to wait until the upload finishes and the button bar at the bottom changes to āAdd to Setā and āAdd to Groupā. By the time the upload is finished, you might not know anymore which photos youād like to add to which photoset or you forget altogether. Itās not really a āset it, then forget itā approach.
This is going to change in flickery 2.0. Here, youāll be able to set everything up beforehand and once the upload itself is done, photos are added to the photosets and groups you have set. So you can set everything up and leave it to flickery to do its thing.
In flickery 2.0, it will be even easier to assign locations to selected items (both photos and videos) using Appleās MapKit features.
The big improvement here is that you can now search for locations and flickery will reverse-geocode that info into a latitude/longitude pair that Maps can understand. If you have a camera without GPS and want to assign a specific location, this comes in very handy.
Iām adding better sorting to flickery with version 2.0. As you can see in the screenshot below, you can sort by Date and Title (booooring) but also by location, for example, based on the distance from the selected item. Items without a location will be sent to the end of the list.
Using Googleās Maps APIs (because Appleās reverse-geocoding is a little bit limited), flickery will also let you sort by Country, City and ZIP/Postal Code.
This comes in very handy when youāre deciding which photosets to add to, for example, or just for the general order of the uploaded items and how they will appear on flickr.
Sadly, Googleās APIs are limited as well (2,000 requests per day per IP address), but itās better than Appleās limitation (which gives out after about 50 consecutive requests – bug report filed! – and yes, I am not geocoding all items at the same time but one after the other, as ādemandedā in Appleās CoreLocation documentation). But I donāt think too many will run into issues with that.
Dealing with many items for upload, it can become overwhelming trying to keep track of everything. With flickery 2.0 I want to simplify that by implementing filters, so you can quickly view only photos or videos, items with or without description, tags, location and if you’ve assigned a photoset/group or not.
That wil make it easy for you to keep on top of everything and make sure youāve done everything you had planned for your upload.
Just like in flickery 1.x, flickery 2.0 will let you quickly convert RAW files (which flickr doesnāt accept) to JPEG files, trying to keep as much EXIF data as possible (which is new in 2.0).
Trimming videos has been in flickery 1.x as well, but is now done with AVKit instead of QuickTime and is quicker and more reliable. It offers the same trimming interface you already know (and hopefully, love) from QuickTime Player:
Iām not sure yet about how deep I want to go into editing (if at all) with flickery 2.0. I figure, most items will come from iPhoto or Aperture anyway, already post-processed by an app that can do it better and is focused on it more than flickery ever would be.
Perhaps I will include very basic editing functionality like rotating and mirroring, but I think that will be about it.
With all this detailed uploading stuff, there needs to be a way to quickly upload something into your stream, a photoset or a group.
So with flickery 2.0, when you drag an image- or video file onto your stream, a photoset or a group it wonāt fuzz about and just directly, quickly upload it without you having to do anything else.
Ā
I think thatās it for this time, Iāll see you next time with some more insights on flickeryās development š
Thank you for reading!
Take care and I hope to see you again next time š
—-
My name is Matt, and Iām the developer ofĀ Eternal Storms Software. You can follow me on twitter here: [twitter-follow screen_name=’eternalstorms’ show_count=’yes’]
As I am now back working on flickery after a short hiatus – sometimes you need a little distance from a project to be able to reflect on it and maybe get a new perspective on some things, I figured Iād talk about the process as I am working on it, not after, in a so-called āpost-mortemā, as my memory is now fresh and āin medias resā.
Before going into about whatās coming though, allow me to go back to see whatās been.
Starting from scratch is usually admitting to having screwed up before. In flickeryās case, I wouldnāt say I screwed up completely. I am, however going to say that I could have done some things better. In some parts, a lot better.
I started developing flickery 1.0 in early 2008. Thatās a long time ago. Iāve become (I hope) a better programmer with a deeper understanding of how things work and are supposed to work. I have (a lot) more experience in Cocoa and a better understanding of UX and UI. I donāt let myself get away with things that work ok but could be better that easily anymore.
This is a good time to start from scratch.
They say the way your desk looks, your mind looks. If you apply that to the code base of flickery 1.x, youād commit me. It is not a pretty sight.
Itās really hard to look at, itās difficult to follow and understandā¦ itās a fine mess, to be honest.
So one part of the reason why I started from scratch is that I didnāt see the forest for the trees (the app for the code) anymore.
Additionally, things have changed a lot in OS X since 2008. Which makes version 2.0 a good point to get rid of all the legacy code (individual code paths for OS X Leopard and every iteration that came after) and create clean code for OS X Mavericks and newer. (Mavericks is a no-brainer, itās a free upgrade, everyone should go and get it.)
Thereās blocks, ARC and Objective-C 2.0, just to name few. Going back to flickery 1.0ās code and re-working all the parts might very well have taken just as long (if not longer) as starting anew. It was totally worth it.
Absolutely essential for flickery is itās communication with flickrās API. Incidentally, in flickery 1.x, that was the #1 cause of crashes and bugs.
Iām not going to tell you how I did it back then; itās just too embarrassing.
This time around, Iām not making the same mistakes again (all the while hoping Iām not making any new ones).
Letās just say, in the old backend, I handed NSDictionaries et.al. back and forth. I didnāt use any XML or JSON parsing, I did it all with NSStringās rangeOfString, etc., not always checking if a range existed before working with it. As I said – embarrassing.
So the first thing I did was switch from getting XML from flickrās API to JSON and not parsing it myself, but letting the system do it. Thatās a huge load off my mind right there.
Secondly, Iām done with handing NSDictionaries, NSArrays, etc., around. The new back-end returns proper objects that contain the necessary info in an easily accessible and understandable way.
There are a few Objective-C wrappers for flickrās API out there, but I didnāt like any of them. They let you do this (pseudo-code)
NSDictionary *responseDict = [SomeFlickrWrapper executeMethod:@āflickr.photos.searchā withParameters:someDictionary];
Aside from also handling OAuth and signing methods, etc., this is all they let you do. So you have to remember the methods, the parameters – itās really not a wrapper, itās an access point to the API.
What makes my back-end different is this:
- (ESSflickrGallery *)createGalleryWithTitle:(NSString *)title
description:(NSString *)description
primaryPhoto:(ESSflickrPhoto *)photo
error:(ESSflickrError **)alert;
You call the method and the back-end does all the parameter and method stuff for you. Itās much neater. In this example, you can also see the use of custom classes instead of dictionaries. ESSflickrGallery, ESSflickrPhoto and ESSflickrError are all wrappers for responses from the API, neatly packed up in an easily accessible class.
I guess I could have used one of the available back-ends as a back-end for my back-end, but I figured, if Iām going through the trouble of matching all available flickr-API-methods, I might as well do the OAuth and signing stuff myself as well.
This new back-end doesnāt only make things easier to develop, read and understand, it also improves the appās stability and performance (mostly because itās easier to develop, read and understand š ).
As you can imagine, this has taken up the most time up until now. Now comes the fun part of using it to create the next version of the app.
I hope youāll enjoy this upcoming series of posts about the development of flickery 2.0 and some of the design decisions behind it.
In part 2, Iāll talk about uploading to flickr with flickery 2.0. Lots of suggestions will make it into the new version š
Thank you for reading. Enjoy your day!
My name is Matt, and Iām the developer ofĀ Eternal Storms Software. You can follow me on twitterĀ here.