Category Archives: frogr

Frogr 0.1 released!

Published / by mario / 5 Comments on Frogr 0.1 released!

After perhaps quite a long time since I announced the “pre-release” of frogr, back in June, I’m now happy to tell the world that the 0.1 release is finally here, providing the user a very basic but still useful set of features to upload his/her pictures to flickr. Basically, as it’s told in the NEWS file, most important changes in this first release regarding to the code from almost 2 montsh ago are:

  • A better UI. Faster and better user experience.
  • Basic configuration management to store account details (auth token).
  • Support for editing details of multiple pictures at the same time.
  • Added status and improved the progress bar usage to show the status of async operations, giving a much better feedback to the end user.
  • A better (and more easily hackable) code and design.
  • No more .glade files, no more gtk-builder-convert.
  • Avoid libgnome dependency if gtk+ >= 2.14 is present
  • Still implemented some parts of the UI (menubar) without GtkBuilder to keep compatibility with Gtk+ 2.12 (least version supported)
  • Bugfixes and several (minor and major) improvements

As usual you can get the source code at http://gitorious.org/frogr, where development for version 0.2 has already started, btw. And if you visit the project’s web at http://code.google.com/p/frogr you could even find some packages for you favourite distro there as well (currently only i386 packages for Ubuntu hardy, intrepid and jaunty are available, but more flavours and platforms are coming soon: debian, fedora, x86_64…).

For the special case of hardy you’ll need to install a newer version of libflickcurl0 than the bundled in hardy repositories (0.12), which you can get from here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/libflickcurl0 (yes, intrepid package will work fine on hardy).

At last, knowing that people use to love screenshots, here you have three of them showing the current status and UI for frogr 0.1. Yes I know, still not too ‘eye-candy’ but hey!… it’s the 0.1 release! what did you expect? We’ll have time enough to improve the UI in the future as long as frogr gets more mature and complete. And in the meanwhile I honestly think current UI is not a complete disaster either :-)

Frogr 0.1 screenshots

Hope you find this interesting.

Have fun!

frogr: flickr remote organizer for GNOME

Published / by mario / 9 Comments on frogr: flickr remote organizer for GNOME

Right some days before than my son was born I started to hack a bit on a new and small project to develop a C-based flickr manager for GNOME, as current alternatives out there (which I were extensively using for more than a year), even thought being great applications, were not by all means what I was looking for or, in other words, what I would expect from a GNOME application which would not only allow me to upload pictures, but also to do a couple more of things like re-tagging pictures or managing albums for instance.

Therefore, bearing in mind how my new responsibilities as a father would add an extra level of challenge to the idea of developing an application when having even less time, I decided to go ahead with it and try to write some basic lines of code to see how feasible this could be. And after two months since I came up with this idea, although I could not of course code everyday (not even every week), I decided some days ago to push this forward and to really acquire the commitment of going ahead with the project in my spare time, even thought there’s not too much nowadays ;-)

So here I am, introducing this new project, so hopefully someone else could like to join this quest and help me to build a full featured flickr manager for our beloved favourite desktop environment. Have to say, of course, that the project is now at a very early stage (no debian package, only basic features, horrible UI…) but please don’t be scared of it just because of that :-). Moreover, in the other hand I have to say as well that at least it already performs the most basic features I thought of for this stage, which are:

  • Asking for authorization inside the user’s flickr account, requesting read/write permissions.
  • Loading several pictures to be uploaded at the same time, showing all of then inside a convenient GtkIconView widget.
  • Upload all the loaded pictures with just one click, opening a specific flickr URL at the end of the process, to allow specifying some properties for the pictures uploaded: name, description and tags.

As you can see this is not too much, but the plan is follow the “release early release often” approach, so that’s why I’m doing this right now. Later on (hopefully soon) many other features will be implemented, which should make of this app a great tool for flickr fans like me… and I guess the code base to make this a reality is already written so now it’s a matter of implementing one feature after another.

Please take a look to the TODO file in case you’re interested in participate, and if you want a more comprehensive list of tasks I think should be the next ones. And obviously I’m open to suggestions so don’t hesitate to comment, propose or criticism anything you want.

To finish with this, I’d like to leave here some pointers, in case you were somehow interested on this project:

So that’s all I guess. Now it’s time for me to continue the development… and for you to start getting involved ;-).

C’mon, flickr maniac, what are you waiting for?

PS: Thanks Adrian for providing a logo for the project. Quite a nice way to get a first contribution with the project ;-)