Facebook Photo Browser: SlickPhoto

Ok, so the Facebook folks have cleared up the problems I was having publishing an app I wrote, and I thought I'd do a quick writeup to announce it.  It's a relatively simple app for viewing your friends' albums.  I had one main goal:

View all your friends' photos without having to load multiple webpages 

Facebook is particularly frustrating for me in that every photo is on its own web page.  It's good because they can load new ads for you, but awful for a person who want to take a quick look through an album.  So I put together an app I named SlickPhoto:

I wrote this app in Flex, which means it's a Flash app.  Now, it started with a single goal, but I ended up with some features that are worth noting:

1. Download any Facebook album as a zip file - Good for Facebook stalkers ;)
2. Slideshows - View any album as a slideshow
3. Full Screen Mode - Both browsing and slideshows can be viewed in full screen mode.
4. Link to albums - You can create a link that will load directly into an album you want to view in SlickPhoto.  You can email this link to your friends so they can go directly into SlickPhoto to look at your album.

It's a relatively simple interface, so you can jump right in by going directly to SlickPhoto, or you can view the application profile before you start using it (although there isn't much there at the moment).  Note that SlickPhoto, like all my other Flash-based apps, has a form for submitting bugs so if you run into any problems feel free to contact me that way.

Now, if I could just figure out how to add search tags so people can find it easier through the Facebook search interface....

Facebook App Directory, Possible Frustrations

So I recently wrote a Facebook app for browsing photos.  You can try it here if you'd like.  It was mostly an experiment to learn about what it's like to go through the whole process of getting an app into the Facebook app directory.  Well, my app has been "approved", but I haven't made a post about it on my blog yet because it still hasn't actually shown up in the Facebook app directory.  It's been approved for oh, I dunno, two months now?

I browsed the Facebook dev forums and came across a couple threads about this problem.  This has been going on for a while.  There are posts from the Facebook admins about it being fixed, and replies saying "no, it isn't".  This has been going on for quite a while (over a year based on one of the threads).

I find it very interesting that such a popular thing has been broken for so long.  I'm lucky since I don't have any monetary interest in getting my app on the directory, but I can imagine this being a serious problem for people who make a living on Facebook apps.  Perhaps the higher profile apps get better service and haven't run into this problem.  I dunno.

At any rate, I thought I'd make a post about this to pass the time while I wait for my app to show up in the directory.  Once it's up there, I'll go over the features and make it official.

MM Ticker Browser 0.2

A while back, I posted a tool for researching stock tickers. Well, after that post I went back into the code and added some functionality for saving preferences. Also around that time, my daily stock watching drifted into just checking the indexes, and that code was forgotten... until today!

I got a request for the source code to MM Ticker Browser, and since my subversion repository no longer has the old code, I figured I'd make an official post about it. I never got around to testing or using the preferences code much, so it may have a couple bugs. That's why there's a bug reporting interface in it :D.

So here's what I've posted:

• MM Ticker Browser 0.2 installer
• MM Ticker Browser source code (as a web based source view)
• or MM Ticker Browser source code (.zip, 1.3 MB)

Remember, this in an Adobe Air app, so you'll need to get Adobe Air.

... and just in case you have problems with this version, you can always use MM Ticker Browser 0.1.