Adam Knight's dashboard

Hey guys. We know it's getting aged, and we're sorry about it. Really. Here's the scoop:

We hired someone to update the app with some new code we had. He bailed when half-done.

Our current developers are very busy writing a large iPhone app/service and we had to schedule other apps to the side to get this out.

When it's out, we'll have one free Cocoa guy to get busy on Photonic, and I'll do my best to make sure he can stick with it long enough to address the current issues.

That will be a free update.

Wow. This is seriously crappy. This kind of a feature has been missing for six months and then is still gone almost a month after someone re-takes ownership? WTF?

I think it's time to go...

Thanks for the praise. :)

On the tags, are you using 1.0.1? I use this almost every day myself and the tags work perfectly for me. How, exactly, are you adding tags? Can you give a specific example that fails to work as expected?

When you type them in, do you get a blue token around each tag after you press the comma key?

If not, try this for tags: tag <return> tag <return> tag <return> <return>

Click on a different image and then back and see if there are tokens around each tag now.

(If moving the plist solved the other issues, yes, please email it to support@bssware.com and include a link to this page.)</return></return></return></return>

Quit Photonic and move the following file to the desktop: ~/Library/Preferences/com.bssware.Photonic.plist

Now start up Photonic, sign in to Flickr again (and reset your preferences) and see if the problem goes away. If it does, we'll want a copy of that preferences file.

If you change the name of the photo and then tab out of the field, does the name change in the list of photos in the middle?

Are you sure the photo is selected before you start entering information? Make sure you click on the photo and then enter the information about it. (Though, if the photo is not selected, you shouldn't be able to enter any information at all.)

Are you asking for a default privacy setting for uploads or for browsing others' photos?

We currently upload the exact file that's on your disk, so it's a lossless upload. We also currently offer (in the preferences window under Upload) the option to scale the image down, if needed.

We could look into the JPEG compression quality as a control, however.

The limit is there because that's the maximum number of photos that Flickr will return in one request. We're working on getting several requests going at once to get all the photos of a set for a future release. – Adam Knight, on August 11, 2008 15:39

Right, and for us to both upload and browse the videos property (as least, what I'd call properly), we need to have some kind of access to the video for playback. I think it would be rather hackish to have a web view just for their Flash player code to reside in, though that may be the eventual solution if there's no further movement on the API or file format front.

QuickTime doesn't natively support the FLV encapsulation format (it requires Perrian the last time I checked) so even with the URL of the FLV file we'd still be in a bind as far as playback and media handling go. What I was hoping to see from Flickr is access to an MP4 file on their side, but it doesn't look like they're going that route. So our choices are limited to either finding a way to include FLV playback code in the app and waiting on the FLV file access (unlikely for various reasons, mostly library licensing issues) or having videos only playable in the detail view (what you get when you double-click on a photo). When it's a video, we'd replace the view with a WebKit view and a player just like you have on the web.

I'm not too fond of it, but that's what we can do with what we have from Flickr. So, as I mentioned in the other response, we're waiting to see what kind of developments come from Flickr in this area before we commit to fully supporting video. The problem is more browsing than uploading at this point (we can always swap in a generic "it's video" thumbnail in the uploader and then allow the file type through all the checks to quickly get video upload in place since the API didn't change there). – Adam Knight, on May 19, 2008 00:33

We're waiting on Flickr to fully reveal the video features in the Flickr API [1]. Once they do that, we'll look into how we're going to support it in the application.

It's certainly something we're watching, but because so much is undone on Flickr's side right now, we can't give a hard answer as to when we can support it.

[1] http://www.flickr.com/services/api/