The Flickr Spinnr 0.3 Release Tuesday 2006-05-16
After a intense finishing session I’m happy to announce the release of FlickrSpinnr version 0.3. As before you can download the WP plugin at Headzoo’s place. The new version, as predicted, uses a Flash presentation layer – the cube. Images are fetched from Flickr and presented on a rotating cube. You can see the cube in rotation in the sidebar. A mockup for the upcoming stand alone version for more or less static web sites can be seen in my labs.
[Edit] Well, the coding session was a bit to hot, and we made a mistake. It was not a feature – it was a bug. If you downloaded the Flickr Spinnr version 0.3 before May 19, you may not see the cube. A bug fixed version is ready for you at Headzoo.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Update: Version 0.4 is released, including a new stand alone variant.
The Flickr Spinnr Saturday 2006-05-06
It’s been a while now, since I had an opportunity to work on the 3D Cube or Flickr Spinnr. Among many other things, such as a bit of gardening and spring start up of the Fridhem house here on Öland, my computer was invaded by stupidity ( my ) and hijackers ( idiots ).
Today I’m up and running and solved a problem with the cube. The images on the cube should link to the Flickr page for that image, but due to concurrent processing of the images, the coupling between addresses and images got lost. An extra wrapper MovieClip around the one holding the image, carries the image id to the processing event handler. It’s a bit technical for a blog post, but the explanation will come in a planned tutorial later on.
I also had an annoying flicker as the images were placed face up on the Stage area before they are glued to the cube. The simple solution was to place that construction area out of sight, i.e. outside the view port of the Flash movie.
Now one quirk is left to think about. The images are mirrored as they are glued to the cube, probably due to the ordering of points that describe the cube faces. As I haven’t written the math for the cube, that will take some effort to change.
[Edit] After lots of ad hoc experimenting with the math of the cube, making symmetric changes to point positions for the cube faces, I gave up that approach. Instead I attacked the inncoming JPEG images and flipped them around the y-axis, before converting to bitmap and throwing them at the 3D engine. Yippee, that works 
For now, have a look at “A Flash 3D Image Cube“, to become a tutorial in the end of time – or maybe earlier.
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