Flickr + Clutter = Fluttr

Hey, I did say your gonna get sick of me :-).

So, what this post about? Well, a little while ago, Matthew and I were talking about what could we do with Clutter which would be quite different and cool, and he had the idea of something involving the internet. So with a little help from our resident flickr master, I embarked on a mission to bring Clutter and Flickr together, in a great union of animations and pixels.

Fluttr

Fluttr is a Clutter based Flickr photo viewer. Once you have authorized with Flickr, you can browse and view your photo sets, together with viewing your photos individually.

A video makes much more sense than I ever could, so:

As you can see, it has cool things like the sets will show the photos within them, photos are downloaded as necessary (and cached locally). It also has a fullscreen option, so it works quite nicely when you want to show off your pictures on your laptop/TV.

You can grab Fluttr from svn by running:

svn co http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/clutter/trunk/toys/fluttr fluttr

Be sure to read the README, as it contains valuable info on how to authorise with Flickr. There are some things that still need to be added, but it works really well, and I hope you guys like it!

And the others thought they had caught up...

hate to depress you again boys, but Awn just keeps getting better and better :-p.

No long time no blog, eh? Don't worry though, that's unlikely to happen again, in fact, I'm sure you'll be sick of me always taking up precious space on PGO with my transparent this and three-dimensional that!

So,
a) how has Awn got better and
b) why am I so happy about it?

Many people already know the answer to (a), latest Awn has full applets support! Yes, that means you can have a trash applet, workspace switcher, and all those other things which you missed from your bottom gnome-panel. I have included a Workspace switcher applet, a Trash applet and a Separator applet in Awn. More to come from me, plus I know of others working on some cool stuff (more on that below).

So, whats the best way to describe this 'applets' malarkey? Well, with a screenshot, of course:

Oh, the main Launcher/Window manager is also an 'applet' (albeit an internal one). So you can position other applets around it.

Okay, moving on, the reason why I am so happy about this feature (over anything else), is that I believe we will now see some really cool stuff for Awn. There have been so many ideas floating around for months, which go from simple applets, to the extravagant (which is pretty easy to do with the excellent Empathy.

I would also love to see some cross-over happening with Gimmie, especially embedding its panel-applet into Awn (blinged up, of course :-).

Anyway, before we get there, I still need to make the applets system a bit more robust, and try and move as much as I can into libawn, so other applets can use colour settings etc, but this is a great start!

P.S. Can I just say thanks to everyone on the forums, bug reporters, and those who leave comments here, they have been really patient, plus they have been invaluable in giving feedback.