Flickr, Contacts and Greasemonkey
A week or so ago, the lovely people at Flickr launched their new iPhone-specific mobile site. It's very nicely done, and there's one thing in particular I noticed that I've always wished for on their main site.
When viewing photos by your contacts, the "next" and "last" photo links don't go within the photostream (as they do on the main site), but they page between contacts instead. It's a really nice way to quickly look through new images.*
Having had a (years-old) desire for this feature on the website rekindled, I decided to spend a few hours with Greasemonkey seeing if I could make it happen, and I managed to do so, thanks largely to people who've led the way. Here's show_flickr_contact_context.user.js.
However, before you go charging in to install it, I should probably warn you that it's very much still at the "proof of concept" stage. Flickr's context boxes are surprisingly complicated little blocks of HTML, and (perhaps ironically) I haven't made any of the JavaScript in them work. Moreover, it seems that I've broken the functionality in existing context blocks. Moreover, the script only works when you've come directly from the Photos from your Contacts page, or if it detects an argument that it sets in the URL from the context paging block.** This is because the API call the script needs to make seems to be quite a complicated one, so I'm trying very hard to be polite with the usage of it.
Anyway, I thought it'd be nice to document even though it's really only getting going, so feel free to have a play with it. If I do tidy up any of its rough edges, I'll be sure to mention it here.
* A couple of minor notes on the implementation. On the plus side, it obeys the setting on the Photos from your Contacts page that sets whether or not you see five or one image from each. However, there's no way to modify this on the phone itself. Unfortunately, it's also hard to change contexts; in other words, to swap from paging by contacts to paging within a user's photostream. Both compromises are down to the lack of space for UI on the iPhone, though, so I'm hardly going to really complain (hence the hiding this in a footnote).
** Ideally I'd do this using Flickr's own convention: /photos/name/id/in/contacts/. Unfortunately, if Flickr finds a /in/ argument it doesn't understand, you get redirected and lose the context, so I'm using /photos/name/id/?contact=in instead. Ah well.
Having had a (years-old) desire for this feature on the website rekindled, I decided to spend a few hours with Greasemonkey seeing if I could make it happen, and I managed to do so, thanks largely to people who've led the way. Here's show_flickr_contact_context.user.js.
However, before you go charging in to install it, I should probably warn you that it's very much still at the "proof of concept" stage. Flickr's context boxes are surprisingly complicated little blocks of HTML, and (perhaps ironically) I haven't made any of the JavaScript in them work. Moreover, it seems that I've broken the functionality in existing context blocks. Moreover, the script only works when you've come directly from the Photos from your Contacts page, or if it detects an argument that it sets in the URL from the context paging block.** This is because the API call the script needs to make seems to be quite a complicated one, so I'm trying very hard to be polite with the usage of it.
Anyway, I thought it'd be nice to document even though it's really only getting going, so feel free to have a play with it. If I do tidy up any of its rough edges, I'll be sure to mention it here.
* A couple of minor notes on the implementation. On the plus side, it obeys the setting on the Photos from your Contacts page that sets whether or not you see five or one image from each. However, there's no way to modify this on the phone itself. Unfortunately, it's also hard to change contexts; in other words, to swap from paging by contacts to paging within a user's photostream. Both compromises are down to the lack of space for UI on the iPhone, though, so I'm hardly going to really complain (hence the hiding this in a footnote).
** Ideally I'd do this using Flickr's own convention: /photos/name/id/in/contacts/. Unfortunately, if Flickr finds a /in/ argument it doesn't understand, you get redirected and lose the context, so I'm using /photos/name/id/?contact=in instead. Ah well.
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