Because it seems that Canola2 beta10 will not be released before christmas, i am now announcing the second official release of the Flickr-plugin for Canola2 beta9, it was just uploaded to extras-devel and also promoted to extras. I decided to set the version number to 0.1.0 instead of the planned 0.0.4 because it now has a lot more features than 0.0.3, is way faster and it seems much more stable than before (it still crashes Canola from time to time, but they should not happen very often).

The complete list of changes since the first release:

• Added new folder “Search”, which will contain the different search options
• Moved mainmenu items a little bit
• Added “Search by tag (global)” option which searches for tags in images of all users
• Added “Search groups” option to search for certain group names
• Updated Flickr search operations, filter results – show only photos, added tag_mode=”all” – all specified tags must be includes in the search results
• Try to handle exception while downloading files to avoid corrupt files in the download folder
• Conflict with Canola2 beta10 to avoid breakage of the plugin when beta10 is about to be installed
• Changed internal structure of the Image-, Group- and Contactlistings to allow using the new page-switch widget of Canola2 beta10 like it is already used in the youtube plugin (not yet working)
• Speed up searching files in the local cache a lot
• Abort downloading images when you leave a image listing, this avoids a lot of unnecessary download traffic (the currently running download will be finished – this may result in adding the image twice to the image-list, if you leave and re-enter the same listing again before the download finished, this bug will be addressed soon)
• Check if enough space is available before downloading images, display error message ist not enough space is left
• Show meaningful messages when no items are found in the listings of photosets, contacts, photos, favorites and groups
• Added a “Add to favorites” option to the context-menu of images
• Depend on python-flickrapi (>= 1.2-1)
• Added an Info option to the context menu of images, which currently displays the name of the image, the owner of the image, the date the image was taken, a small thumbnail, the description and the tags of the image
• Added custom RowRenderers for listings of Photos, Photosets, Contacts and Groups, all of them are displaying a nice thumbnail and at least for Photos and Photosets, some additional information
• Added context menus to Photosets, Groups and Contacts, displaying some additional information about the corresponding item
• Renamed Interesting Images option to Explore, Explore now contains sub-options for showing the Interesting photos of the last 7 days
• Renamed “Latest Images” to Photostream, show the 30 newest photos instead of the 20 latest ones
• Added new option Tags under Explore, with the suboptions “Hot tags (today)” and “Hot tags (this week)”, shows the “hottest” tags from flickr and the newest corresponding images
• Added “Recently uploaded photos” option to Explore page
• Added option to see the comments for photos in the photo context menu
• Delete /home/user/.canola/plugins.pickle in postinst when upgrading from an old version (< 0.0.4) to circumvent a problem with the new context options (would show up empty)

Some screeenshots:

How to contribute:

If you experience some problems with the plugin, you can now report them on http://bugs.maemo.org – feature requests are also very welcome. For general discussion about the plugin, please use the following thread on ITT.

If you are interested in the source code, please check my gitweb page.

So now have fun with the plugin. 🙂

Ok, it has been some time since my last post, in the meantime i changed a lot to the plugin, especially in the last 3 weeks (Those of you who are subscribed to the RSS-Feed of my Gitweb page, might have noticed allready. ;-)), it is almoast too much to go into every detail, so i will just post the current changelog since the last release here:

• Added new folder “Search”, which will contain the different search options
• Moved mainmenu items a little bit
• Added “Search by tag (global)” option which searches for tags in images of all users
• Added “Search groups” option to search for certain group names
• Updated Flickr search operations, filter results – show only photos, added tag_mode=”all” – all specified tags must be includes in the search results
• Try to handle exception while downloading files to avoid corrupt files in the download folder
• Updated dependencies for Canola2 beta10
• Changed internal structure of the Image-, Group- and Contactlistings to allow using the new page-switch widget of Canola2 beta10 like it is already used in the youtube plugin (not yet working)
• Speed up searching files in the local cache a lot
• Added new mainmenu option Tags, with the suboptions “Hot tags (today)” and “Hot tags (this week)”, shows the “hottest” tags from Flickr and the 20 newest corresponding images
• Abort downloading images when you leave a image listing, this avoids a lot of unnecessary download traffic (the currently running download will be finished – this may result in adding the image twice to the image-list, if you leave and re-enter the same listing again before the download finished, this bug will be addressed soon)
• Check if enough space is available before downloading images
• Show meaningful messages when no items are found in the listings of photosets, contacts, photos, favorites and groups
• Added a “Add to favorites” option to the context-menu of images
• Depend on python-flickrapi (>= 1.1-2)
• Added an Info option to the context menu of images, which currently displays the name of the image, the owner of the image, the date the image was uploaded, a small thumbnail, the description and the tags of the image

Ok, now for the curious, just a few screenshots of the current version:

Ok, now i am pretty shure that most of you who read this post until this point, want to know when this version of the plugin will be released. The answer is simple: I plan to upload this version to extras-devel, a short time after the official release of Canola 2 beta10, which should happen very soon.

And btw: Thanks to the Flickr Stats for the API-Key of Canola-Flickr, i know that Canola-Flickr has been used by about 650 different Flickr-Users until today, i am very impressed about this number, considering the fact that i announced it as being alpha-quality software and that i did not do much advertising, except posting a short note on ITT and adding it to extras-devel and later extras. 🙂

I am very pleased to announce the first alpha-release of the Flickr-Plugin for Canola, current features are the following:

• Display the users photosets, favorites and images which are not part of any set
• Search for images with specific tags in the users images
• Display the contacts of the user, their photosets and of course the images in their photosets
• Display the latest 20 images of the most interesing images on Flickr
• Display the groups you and your contacts are in and the images which are contained in the corresponding group pools, limited the the 20 latest ones.

A few screenshots show how it looks like and what is new compared to my first pre-announcement of the plugin.

The list of known problems are the following:

• The image files are cached locally (in your specified download-folder of Canola), this cache grow to a very big size, depending on how many images you view (the plugin does not download full sized images yet, for speed reasons, it just tries to fetch images with match the screen-resolution best, which in most cases will be the “Large” Size of the Flickr-image)
• Canola sometimes tends to crash when viewing images, it happens only on the tablets, not in the development-version of Canola, so i could not yet reproduce and fix the problem
• It is currently not possible to delete the user-credentials and change to another Flickr-User, if you wish to do this, you should stop Canola, delete /home/user/.flickr and start Canola again

So after you have read though this, you migth want to know where to get the plugin:

It is should be available in the extras-devel-repositories for Diablo and Chinook, but unfortunaely i was hit by bug #3549. Because of this, i created a temporary repository, where you can install the plugin from, this repository will be removed, as soon as the bug with the autobuilder is fixed.

Please report back what you think about the plugin, if it works for you, ideas and everything else. I have just started a new thread on ITT, it can be found here: <add url here> . I am also still in Berlin at the Maemo Summit, please contact me directly, for those of you who do not know me (probably most of you), it am wearing a black Debian T-Shirt, with a big red Debian swirl on the front.

My TODO-List for the plugin already contains a number of items, here is a short excerpt:

• Rowrenderer similiar to the youtube-plugin to show thumbnails+meta-information
• Meta-Information of the image in the context-menu of the image-viewer, similar to the youtube-plugin
• Option to download the Original-Sized-Image in the context-menu
• Option to switch to another flickr-user in the Settings-Menu
• Option to delete/cleanup the image-cache in the Settings-Menu
• Thumbnail-View of the images similar to the local image-browser
• Extend the Contacts-menu with photos not in a set or with photostream option

Just for the curious: the source-code is available under http://git.geekbu.de/?p=canola-flickr.git, you can also fetch it with:

git clone git://git.geekbu.de/canola-flickr.git

btw: Please do not blame the Canola Developers for bugs caused by this plugin, i am not related to them, and it was probably me who caused a bug which you are experiencing (especially if your Canola tends to crash while using the plugin).

The only thing you could blame them for is the missing api-documentation of Canola, but as i just hear in Handful’s talk, this should not be a problem anymore soon, when Canola will be fully open-sourced. 😉

This is actually a modified version of the first draft of the announcement, where i wanted to announce version 0.0.1 of canola-flickr, but unfortunately i was hit by bug #3549 with the autobuilders when i tried to upload the first version, about 6 weeks ago.

I started writing a flickr-plugin for Canola last week, you can see the current status on the screenshots below. There is still some work to do before i can do the first release, for example the most important part still does not work, it can not display any image yet. 😉

The current TODO-List is the following:

• add a working setup-menu to be able to specify the flickr-user and get a valid auth token
• get the thumbnail-browsing working
• get image-viewer working

I hope that the Canola-Guys could give me some hints how to implement the missing parts, the current sources can be found under http://git.geekbu.de/.