FLAPI viewer public beta

The first beta version of our Flickr image viewer in Flash is ready. We're not going to make the .fla available for now, but hang on a week and you can find him here.

What's now important is that we can get some good feedback from you. So we can take that into account for our next beta version which is scheduled for a week.
This beta has some restrictions that the next won't have, we just want you to focus on the user experience and usability of the current version.

Introduction
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Why would you spend money on expensive photo hosting if you can have a Flickr account? But still want to integrate your images into your own site? Well we had the same problem. So we started to develop this viewer, but we wanted to make it as customizable as possible so we could use it on different kind of sites with different styles. Now if you're still interested, we would love if you could test it out for us. Give us some feedback, if you want to use it, where and how? what has to change? If you don't want to use it, tell us why?
Next to our own needs for this viewer, we were able to integrate it in an assignment for our last year C-MD. So believe me, the more feedback, the better.

Where can I use this photo viewer
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• Integrate in your html site
  
• Integrate in your flash site
• Integrate in a blog post
  
• Standalone 100%*100% slideshow viewer
  

Current features
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*not available in current live beta

• View flickr photo's, 3 modes : View a users recent pictures, view 1 specific photoset view , overview of all your photosets.
  
• Scalable, this means you can integrate it at any size. The viewer can be width:100% height:100% as well as width:300px height 200px.
  
• Change colors of text, backgrounds, border, ... *
• Choose between : always visible thumbs, no thumbs, hiding thumbs *
• Customizable photo info panel: link to flickr page of photo, photo title, photo description, date taken, ... *
  
• Slideshow *

TODO
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• If we resize the images in flash, they loose some quality. With a new class (bitmapData) in flash 8 we hopefully can fix this, where looking in to this.
  
• It would be nice if you could have more control over the thumbnails, make them smaller, position them where you want.
  
• View your favorites, a bit tricky (needs authentication)
• some resizing and position problems and strange sizes, but it will probably just work if you choose the right size.
• Make active image thumb visible.
  
• On full screen size, limit the 1024 size.
  
• On size bigger then 500 test first of the 1024 image is available, give error message is it isn't available.
  
• Slideshow of original pictures.
• Slideshow function on/off
• Link to flickr image page
  
• Choose your transition
• Authenticate user, make private sets visible in viewer. Optional password protection for sets.
  
• something else ... do tell us !!

Demo's
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• http://lancemccord.com/archives/some_of_my_favorite_pictures.php
• http://blog.f4l.be/
  

Current beta
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Go to the following url and help is on that page. You can fill in your own parameters, so the viewer can display your images:

http://cmdstud.khlim.be/~ldetrez/form/index.php

Bugs
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• some resizing and position problems at full screen
• Large image doesn't display if your flash movie is bigger then 540*540px and 1024px version is not available on flickr.
  
• some other small and bigger bugs...
• Loads wrong photoset in internet explorer, doesn't give the get vars to swf.
  

We cannot be held reponsible for any kind of use of flapi viewer. The end user decides which photos he loads into the viewer.

Again if anything went wrong, something didn't worked anymore please leave a comment on this post with your problem. If you just have a comment or a new feature, always welcome. We'll look into it.

Thanks,

Lev, Frederik and Jesse