Archive for the ‘Web Services’ Category

File Under: APIs, Multimedia, Web Services
May
24
2012

Flickr Amps Up the Social With New ‘Groups’ Features

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Flickr's new group pool pages, now with "justified" view.

Flickr has made some small but welcome upgrades to the cornerstone of its social features — Flickr Groups. The changes include a new way to view group pools and the ability to post directly to groups using Flickr’s new HTML5 uploader.

Flickr lacks the hype of more recent photo-sharing services like Instagram, but remains popular with pro and amateur photographers alike at least in part because of the community that continues, despite some stumbles, to exist on the site. Much of that community is built around Flickr Groups, like-minded photographers banding together to share images of anything from beautiful mountains to sushi to a shared love of RAW images from micro 4/3 cameras.

In an effort to make it easier for Flickr fans to contribute to Groups, Flickr’s recently updated photo uploader now offers an option to share your photos with any group you’ve joined directly from the upload page.

Perhaps more importantly, Flickr is extending the Flickr API with the same features, making it possible for third-party applications — like your favorite iOS and Android photo apps — to add the same group sharing features. Developers can check out the Flickr code blog for more on what’s new in the Flickr API.

As part of today’s Groups upgrade, Flickr is also extending its “justified” view — which tiles images to fit more photos at larger sizes in a smaller space — to Group photo pools. Along with the justified view, Group Photo Pool pages now have a persistent (but collapsible) sidebar where you can quickly access group discussion threads, view tags and see the top contributors.

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Services
May
15
2012

Flickr Goes Big With Larger Images, Responsive Redesign

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Flickr: now with bigger images and a (mostly) responsive design.

Flickr recently changed its “lightbox” photo pages — the darker photo-friendly interface on the site — to display much larger photos. Now the grandfather of online photo-sharing sites is rolling out a site-wide redesign that uses the same big, beautiful images to put your photos front and center on every page.

The larger images in Flickr’s revamped photo pages put the emphasis where it belongs — on your photos. Peripheral information, like comments, maps, tags, set info and so on are still there, they’re just now (rightly) dwarfed by the actual image.

The result is a much more photo-centric site that does a nice job of differentiating itself from the current trend of low-res, filter-heavy photo0sharing services.

Web developers, take note: Flickr’s new layout isn’t just eye-catching, it’s also somewhat responsively designed — adjusting to the myriad screens on the web today and displaying the best photo possible without clogging your tubes with huge photo downloads. Flickr does stop short of scaling pages down to phone-size screens — for which there is a separate mobile website — but it resizes nicely to handle tablets.

That’s right, Flickr is the latest (and perhaps the largest) website to embrace not just a mostly responsive design with a liquid layout and media queries, but also a responsive approach to images.

We’ve looked at dozens of ways to handle images in a responsive design, but Flickr has opted for a custom setup that uses a bit of server-side PHP and some JavaScript to serve images based on screen size. Flickr is also using a custom algorithm that takes the width and height of the screen into account and “will display content at a width that will best showcase the most common photo ratio, the 4:3.”

For more details on how Flickr is handling the responsive aspects of the new design, check out the Flickr code blog.

Developers working with the Flickr API should note that the new photo sizes are now available through the Flickr API if your app or website would also like to display larger images.

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File Under: Programming, Web Services
May
9
2012

Gitspective: A Facebook-Style Timeline for Your Code

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Wired's Gitspective on life.

What’s far more interesting than what your friends are doing? What your code is doing, of course. That’s why we’re enjoying Gitspective, developer Zach Moazeni’s Facebook-style timeline for your GitHub events.

Moazeni’s code uses the GitHub API to pull in pushes, forks, gists, branches, tags, follows and comments, displaying them in a vertical timeline reminiscent of Facebook. If you’d like to try it out, just head over to Gitspective’s GitHub page and plug in your GitHub user name.

The Gitspective code is still a work in progress and Moazeni has already listed a few wish-list items over on the Hacker News thread. If you’d like to contribute, grab the code on GitHub.

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File Under: Web Services
May
7
2012

Back Up Your Gmail Account With Gmvault

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You can never have too many backups of your data. Unfortunately, when it comes to web-based e-mail like Gmail, backing up your mail isn’t always the easiest thing to do. The web is littered with tales of lost Gmail, whether because Google shuts down your account, an attacker destroys it or something else that’s never even crossed your mind happens and then — poof — your mail is gone.

That’s where Gmvault can help. Gmvault will help make sure that even if the unthinkable happens and your Gmail data is suddenly gone, you’ll be able to recover thanks to a solid backup system. Gmvault is a simple-to-use command-line Python app that will login, sync and back up your entire Gmail account on your local machine. Currently Gmvault is beta software. I’ve been using it for nearly a week and haven’t had any problems, but bear in mind that there may be some bugs.

You can accomplish the same thing with a desktop e-mail client, provided you remember to open it every now and then. But with Gmvault and simple cron script you can make sure your backup is updated every day. Throw in a line to move your database to a new location when the backup is done and you’ll have incremental snapshot backups of your Gmail account.

Gmvault will encrypt your saved e-mail repository to keep it safe from prying eyes. That means you can use Dropbox or similar web-based backup and syncing systems without worrying that your personal information is exposed.

Another interesting feature in Gmvault is the ability to restore e-mails to any Gmail account. That makes creating additional Gmail-based backup accounts a snap. Just create a new Gmail account, select your current account’s backup and use the restore command to recreate your mailboxes. All attributes such as Gmail labels are preserved and recreated in the new account.

Gmvault is a shell script available for Windows, OS X and Linux. Head on over to GitHub and grab a copy today so you can start making backups of your Gmail before you need them.

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File Under: Software, Web Services
May
3
2012

Microsoft Puts ‘Windows Live’ Brand Out to Pasture [Updated]

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Windows 8. Photo: Microsoft

Microsoft is getting ready to ditch the “Windows Live” moniker for the company’s suite of online services like mail, messaging, syncing and account management. The changes to Microsoft’s cloud offerings will be more than skin deep though; the revamped Windows Live services will be tightly integrated into the coming Windows 8 operating system.

When Windows 8 arrives it will be “cloud-powered”, as the Building Windows 8 blog puts it. That means the Windows Live Essentials app suite (a separate download for Windows 7) will no longer be around. Instead Metro-style apps that handle mail, photos, calendars and sharing are a default part of Windows 8 and come already connected to the cloud.

When you sign into a Windows 8 PC or tablet with your Microsoft account — that would be the account formerly known as Windows Live ID — your e-mail, calendar, contacts, messages, and shared photo albums are synced to that machine.

What’s slightly confusing about the changes is that they represent an about face not only in branding, but in goals. When Microsoft introduced the Windows Live Essentials suite of apps for Windows 7, it touted the fact that they were separate applications that could be updated more frequently than Windows itself. Now Microsoft is once again integrating the apps and their syncing components into the OS and this time around it’s touting the integration rather than the separation.

Microsoft's chart of software and services in the coming world of Windows 8.

There’s one exception to the Windows-Live-to-Metro-app migration — Microsoft’s blogging software, Windows Live Writer, which is not mentioned at all in Microsoft’s announcement. While far from the most popular of the Windows Live Essentials apps, Live Writer has a vocal and enthusiastic user base as is evidenced by the numerous comments on the Building Windows 8 blog. Microsoft did not respond to our inquiries regarding Live Writer in time for this post. [Update: Microsoft tells Wired that it will have "more info soon," but in the mean time points out that "all desktop apps work great and are supported on Windows 8, including Windows Live Writer." In other words, even if Live Writer doesn't get a Metro makeover, the standard desktop app will work just fine in Windows 8.]

To learn more about the changes and see the new Windows 8 syncing features in action, be sure to watch the video on the Windows 8 blog.

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