Screaming Penguin

The ubiquitous example yet again, a flickr photo explorer. I know there are hundreds of these of different types, but get over it. The reason there are so many is, it's cool, and it's interesting as you are developing an example to get new and different visual content each time, plus the flickr APIs make it nice for the people. So, on with the show. This evening I created a quick non-complicated Google Wave Gadget to demonstrate how it's done, and to start hashing out examples for the next book I am writing for Manning Publications - Google Wave in Action (shhh though, that is still sort of an under the radar thing, and if *both* of you that read this blog keep it under your hat, we can keep it that way). The gadget itself simply allows you to get the last 10 recent photos on the flickr photostream, and to refresh (Ajax style, not page refresh). It looks like this: And, if you want to try it outside of Wave, it works as a regular web page too - that is hosted here: http://www.screaming-penguin.com/wtemp/flickr_gadget.html. If you want to check out the gadget inside Wave (meaning you have a Wave account, of course), the Gadget URL is: http://www.screaming-penguin.com/wtemp/flickr_gadget.xml. To add a Gadget to a Wave, open the Wave, then start a new reply and then click the green "Add Gadget" button in the toolbar: I have to give props to Ryan Heath for the main part of the JavaScript code. I started out to do this manually, and then thought, wait, somebody has wrapped this with a nice JavaScript API, maybe even using JQuery or such, and sure enough, Ryan has. I modified a bit of the code (reset button) and trimmed it to keep the example ultra short, but no big deal thanks to Ryan and JQuery and flickr. I plan to add several more features to it before I publish it as an official Wave Gadget (search by tag or by flickr user, display different sizes, animate to larger image in same document rather than link to images externally, and the like), but it's a start.