Smile

During the last days (well, actually during the last nights [*]), I’ve been spending some time in adapting frogr 0.2 to also compile and work on my brand new N900 (thanks Igalia!), and this is the humble result up to date:

Perhaps you’re thinking why the hell I needed frogr to upload pictures when the N900 already comes with a nice and handy sharing application to upload pictures directly from the camera app or the image viewer, so here you have some use cases where I found the  sharing app not enough for my needs:

• To upload several pictures in a row to flickr, instead of having to do it one by one (tipical use case after taking several pictures that I’d like to share/backup in flickr).
• To set same name, description and/or tags to a bunch of pictures instead of doing it one by one (related to previous use case).
• To be able to upload pictures as “private” instead of “public”.

Update: I’m correcting this post here since it seems the sharing application already was capable of doing some of those things I mentioned above (ups!). Anyway, as I commented there, this does not discourage me even a little bit of keeping porting my little frogr to Fremantle, but just encourage me to try to make a difference and because… why not to tell it? I’d just love to bring frogr with me wherever I go . Thanks Daniel for your comment!

Current status of this port to Fremantle is still work in progress so don’t expect to find anything working out-of-the-box if you download the source code at this moment, but the idea is to get it into a stable state soon to upload it to maemo-extras, along with a packaged version for Fremantle of the great flickcurl library, which is a requirement for frogr to work (and at this moment I’m jsut packaging and using it on my own for development purposes).

[*] I think the screenshot explains pretty well the main reason why I work so slowly and at late hours in frogr

After coming back from an awesome week of holidays in Paris (lovely city, btw!), today I finally managed to get some time for making up what it became the second upstream release of frogr: frogr 0.2

Just trying to give a brief update on “what is new”, here you have an excerpt from the NEWS file:

• Generate ChangeLog from git log with ‘make dist’
• Added .spec file for fedora 11 packaging system (thanks Adrián Pérez)
• Added drag’n'drop support for loading pictures in frogr
• Added support to add tags to pictures (instead of just replacing)
• Fixed (legacy) support for libgnome2 to compile in debian lenny
• Use accesor functions instead direct access and removed some deprecated GTK+ symbols (thanks Javier Jardón)
• Added i18n support and a es_ES lang file (thanks Alejandro Piñeiro, aka API)
• Support silent build rules with automake 1.11 (thanks Javier Jardón)
• Bugfixes and several minor improvements

Entering in more detail, and as you can easily extract from the list above, the main improvements from the user’s point of view are:

• Drag’n'drop now supported, so having to add pictures through the filechooser is no longer the only method to load pictures in frogr.
• New “add tags” dialog, very handy to add tags to some specific pictures before uploading them.
• i18n support, which should make easier to get more contributions for frogr in further releases, in the form of new translations to make it even more accessible for people all over the world (did I say we’re eager for new language files?)

At last, just to mention that you already can find pre-compiled packages for some distros at the web of the project, as well as the source code tarballs in gzip and bzip2 formats. And of course, get the source code from the git repository at gitorius, in case you prefer to directly clone the source tree to make up wonderful and nice patches to contribute with, or just to provide new pre-compiled packages for your favourite distro

So… what else could I say? Just go and get it… Hope you enjoy it as much as I do

Update [2009/10/14]: It seems the other day my mind was still a bit “on holidays” and I screwed it up when creating both the pre-compiled packages and the source tarballs uploaded to the web of the project, so they would just not  work as they should when installing frogr (basically, they would not install files under the proper path so frogr just would not work).

I realized of this yesterday and now everything should be fixed in packages (and tarballs) uploaded in the “Downloads” section of such a web, so if you experienced any problems two days ago just try now again and everything should be fine.

After perhaps quite a long time since I announced the “pre-release” of frogr, back in June, I’m now happy to tell the world that the 0.1 release is finally here, providing the user a very basic but still useful set of features to upload his/her pictures to flickr. Basically, as it’s told in the NEWS file, most important changes in this first release regarding to the code from almost 2 montsh ago are:

• A better UI. Faster and better user experience.
• Basic configuration management to store account details (auth token).
• Support for editing details of multiple pictures at the same time.
• Added status and improved the progress bar usage to show the status of async operations, giving a much better feedback to the end user.
• A better (and more easily hackable) code and design.
• No more .glade files, no more gtk-builder-convert.
• Avoid libgnome dependency if gtk+ >= 2.14 is present
• Still implemented some parts of the UI (menubar) without GtkBuilder to keep compatibility with Gtk+ 2.12 (least version supported)
• Bugfixes and several (minor and major) improvements

As usual you can get the source code at http://gitorious.org/frogr, where development for version 0.2 has already started, btw. And if you visit the project’s web at http://code.google.com/p/frogr you could even find some packages for you favourite distro there as well (currently only i386 packages for Ubuntu hardy, intrepid and jaunty are available, but more flavours and platforms are coming soon: debian, fedora, x86_64…).

For the special case of hardy you’ll need to install a newer version of libflickcurl0 than the bundled in hardy repositories (0.12), which you can get from here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/libflickcurl0 (yes, intrepid package will work fine on hardy).

At last, knowing that people use to love screenshots, here you have three of them showing the current status and UI for frogr 0.1. Yes I know, still not too ‘eye-candy’ but hey!… it’s the 0.1 release! what did you expect? We’ll have time enough to improve the UI in the future as long as frogr gets more mature and complete. And in the meanwhile I honestly think current UI is not a complete disaster either

Hope you find this interesting.

Have fun!

Right some days before than my son was born I started to hack a bit on a new and small project to develop a C-based flickr manager for GNOME, as current alternatives out there (which I were extensively using for more than a year), even thought being great applications, were not by all means what I was looking for or, in other words, what I would expect from a GNOME application which would not only allow me to upload pictures, but also to do a couple more of things like re-tagging pictures or managing albums for instance.

Therefore, bearing in mind how my new responsibilities as a father would add an extra level of challenge to the idea of developing an application when having even less time, I decided to go ahead with it and try to write some basic lines of code to see how feasible this could be. And after two months since I came up with this idea, although I could not of course code everyday (not even every week), I decided some days ago to push this forward and to really acquire the commitment of going ahead with the project in my spare time, even thought there’s not too much nowadays

So here I am, introducing this new project, so hopefully someone else could like to join this quest and help me to build a full featured flickr manager for our beloved favourite desktop environment. Have to say, of course, that the project is now at a very early stage (no debian package, only basic features, horrible UI…) but please don’t be scared of it just because of that . Moreover, in the other hand I have to say as well that at least it already performs the most basic features I thought of for this stage, which are:

• Asking for authorization inside the user’s flickr account, requesting read/write permissions.
• Loading several pictures to be uploaded at the same time, showing all of then inside a convenient GtkIconView widget.
• Upload all the loaded pictures with just one click, opening a specific flickr URL at the end of the process, to allow specifying some properties for the pictures uploaded: name, description and tags.

As you can see this is not too much, but the plan is follow the “release early release often” approach, so that’s why I’m doing this right now. Later on (hopefully soon) many other features will be implemented, which should make of this app a great tool for flickr fans like me… and I guess the code base to make this a reality is already written so now it’s a matter of implementing one feature after another.

Please take a look to the TODO file in case you’re interested in participate, and if you want a more comprehensive list of tasks I think should be the next ones. And obviously I’m open to suggestions so don’t hesitate to comment, propose or criticism anything you want.

To finish with this, I’d like to leave here some pointers, in case you were somehow interested on this project:

• Website: http://code.google.com/p/frogr
• Mailing lists:
  • General discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/frogr-users
  • Technical discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/frogr-devel
• Source code: http://gitorious.org/frogr

So that’s all I guess. Now it’s time for me to continue the development… and for you to start getting involved .

C’mon, flickr maniac, what are you waiting for?

PS: Thanks Adrian for providing a logo for the project. Quite a nice way to get a first contribution with the project