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The so-called “w5” application

With the release of the Mirror Project Random Image Widget just waiting for some final decisions to be hashed out, I started work on porting the code to a more generic random image client.

 

The first step was to add hooks that allow a user to specify a maximum width or height when displaying an image. I really don't want the number of options, or preferences, to exceed more than a handful but this one seems important. Using only myself as a judge I know that I would get annoyed pretty quickly if the little toy sitting in the corner of my monitor kept swelling to fill the entire screen.

As the screenshot illustrates this approach raises some issues with the menus available to user to which I say : the program was not meant to be used with your operating system's “magnify” tool — if you're going to set the maximum allowable width to 100 pixels, you'll just have to use the keyboard hooks if you want to pause the application.

Anyway, here's the road map for version 1.0 :

  • add hooks to talk to more than one server
  • add hooks to read server list (and any login data) from a config file
  • add preferences widget to manage config file
  • add hooks to watch config file for changes so that the program will just DWIM if a user changes the list of servers via the command line, or whatever
  • figure out how to muck with the transport layer to allow the user to specify a maximum allowable download size — necessary?
  • add hooks for handling some kind of Bloom filter-esque data store as a way of preventing the same image from being displayed twice
  • finalize the API
  • bless as 1.0

There will likely be source releases along the way.

Version 2.0 might have hooks for reading and displaying Creative Commons data, similar to what the mozCC Mozilla extension does. I'm not sure about this one because it feels like feeping creaturitus. But it would be nice to do something to help promote the initiative and another part of me thinks it's one of those applications where quick and easy access to that kind of licensing data is a no-brainer.

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