graemef.com

In my spare time (well, the small amount of it I have when my eyes don’t want
to close) I’ve been working on a slideshow/screensaver application for
Flickr. I love Flickr. It’s
great. For my money, a screen saver is the ideal way to keep an eye on your
photos past and present. There are screensavers out there but I’ve not found one
that cuts the mustard as far as I’m concerned.

My approach is to use Direct3D to smoothly animate photos on and off in
various ways, and to do that nice slow, gentle panning that really gives a
slideshow that polished look. I also have plans to allow very flexible
selections of photos to be displayed by combining photos from multiple queries
in interesting ways.
This bit will be extensible, too.

I’ve a bit of D3D experience so I started with a DirectX SDK sample application and I’m slowly bending it
to my will. It’s all slowly coming back to
me. So far it displays one photo at a time with no animation, and there’s a
"Next Photo" button which when pressed causes the next photo to be retrieved.
Unfortunately, Flickr seems to return an error in the somewhat inconvenient form
of a GIF image more often than not, but at
least it doesn’t crash, unlike some Flickr screensavers I could mention!

Anyway, it’s open source and available (in its very, very early pre-alpha
form with only the above functionality)
here on SourceForge.
Currently only source code is available (via CVS), and you need a recent .NET
2.0 CTP to build it. I’ll start making releases when Beta 2 of the .NET
Framework 2.0 is made publicly available -
there’s no
"go live" license yet.

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