23 Jan 2008

Alpha 0.39 and Fast vs More?

So we've been quietly updating the Viewr in the past months, and have today released the 'World Move' slider to replace the previous 'Camera Info' slider.

Check it out at http://www.quakr.co.uk/viewr. All comments as ever welcome.

Now. In building and releasing this version (and the last three or four to be frank), we've changed the way we GET from Flickr. In the distant past, we asked Flickr for the whole set of geo-located photos in a specific Bounding Box. Simple really. The only trouble was that a whole pile of them (90+%) were *no use* to us as they had no directional tag. So then we extended the Flickr API query to get ONLY the photos which were geo-located AND had some kind of directional tag (geo:dir, ge:head, ge:heading, kml:heading or geo:heading). Fabulous. And FAST. Now we were only getting usable photos and the response was speedy.

But. Then we started thinking about usability and we added support for point. But point isn't a machine tag, so attempting the fast GET wouldn't be sufficient to capture all the newly tagged photos. Hmmm...

So what'd you prefer? 'Fast' or 'More'??? We're obviously considering a solution which would do both, but for now, give us a vote! We're defaulting to the 'More' version.

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