FlickrFan Turns Any Photostream Into a Mac Screen Saver
A new application called FlickrFan lets you use photos from multiple RSS feeds as your screen saver. It’s a free program for Mac OS X.
As the name suggests, FlickrFan is geared towards Flickr users. By default, it sets up a folder on your hard drive and syncs your "recent photos" feed from your Flickr account to your local machine. Then, you just point your screen saver to draw from that pool of recent photos and you’ve got a scrolling slide show of all of your photos to show off.
What sets FlickrFan apart is the ability to display photos from multiple feeds. When you give it your Flickr account information, FlickrFan also generates a list of your contacts. You can choose to pull from any of those feeds as well.
There’s a Windows application called Slickr which accomplishes something similar, but I haven’t tested it yet.
FlickrFan accepts any RSS feed that uses media enclosures, and included in the package is a checkbox for news photos from the Associated Press. The first time I ran it, I let FlickrFan pull just AP photos, then I sat back and watched. I run two monitors here at my desk at Wired, so I can see two photos from the news agency side by side. This makes for some fantastic juxtapositions — like a picture of Bhutto smiling on one screen and her coffin being hoisted by mourners on the other, or of Iraqi children playing soccer on one side and a center ice scrum from an NHL hockey game on the other.
There’s also a decent set of preferences to futz with, including privacy settings and the ability to share pointer URLs to your photos with your Twitter followers. It can also be used as a simple file transfer and backup utility.
FickrFan was created by software developer and RSS guru Dave Winer. It’s a public beta release right now, so the install package isn’t that user friendly. Be sure to follow the instructions on the FlickrFan site. It’s based on Winer’s OPML editor code, and it uses the same icon. Don’t just drag and drop the application icon — you need to drag the entire folder into your Applications directory in order to install it. Click on the application icon to launch it, then watch your browser. All of the configuration happens there.
Once you’re in the browser, it’s a breeze. I’ve included a screenshot of the setup process below.
Winer sees it not only as a computer screen saver, but as a new way to experience the sharing culture of the internet on your television. From his blog, Scripting News:
The idea is simple. There’s a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you’ll understand the vision.
So next time you have friends over, put FlickrFan on your Mac Mini and entertain your guests with gruesome warzone photos in startling high-def. Or maybe un-check that AP box before they arrive.
