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Reviewed Showcase App

DestroyFlickr - experience Flickr with added AIR

June 11th 2008 | by James

(27 votes, 4.2/5)

DestroyFlickr might sound like a frightful Adobe AIR application to run on your machine. Wow it can destroy Flickr I thought! Well according to Jonnie Hallman of DestroyToday,

To destroy today is to make the most of the day—destruction as a form of creation. This is my carpe diem.

So DestroyFlickr is intended to make the most of Flickr, and it goes along way towards that goal. The application and Jonnie’s homepage have a great look to them and he is obviously aware of how to convey information clearly and without cluter. The primary objective of the AIR application is to provide a better less messy way to navigate Flickr.

As with all Flickr applications you have to authorise DestroyFlickr to access your account. After passing the authentication you are presented with a profile page showing your recent uploads and those of your contacts. The navigation is unconventionally at the bottom but once you have used it for a while it works quite well and stays out of the way.

The photos are well laid out, although I’m not sure about the random skewing personally preferring non rotated images. Rolling over an image shows a tooltip and smooth animation to straighten the image. Selecting will scroll the interface across to the photo screen or workspace. The photo screen is direct and clear even enabling a larger view of the photo if required and any meta data.

This is one of the first AIR applications I have seen that has really good online documentation with screenshots. This is only available from the apps website and I didn’t see a direct link within the AIR app.

There are many features in this application and it’s best to just explore. You can upload photos, edit your picture info and search other users and pictures.

Workspaces for different Flickr accounts is a really nice feature. I liked the way you can skip through the gallery pages by clicking and dragging on the page number. It’s those little details that make a great AIR application.

Design eye

The dark theme is nice and very Lightroom inspired. However there is no custom chrome and the window size is fixed, so no full screen view. Having a good fullscreen experience with this app I think would be a major addition in the future.

Clear typography and layout, as mentioned previously I would like to toggle the option of having the photos rotated or not.

Technical eye

~~My guess is that this is built with Flash not Flex and uses the Flickr API extensively.~~
This AIR app is built using ActionScript 3 and the Flex Builder IDE. There is an extensive custom display framework that enables dynamic asset and graphic creation entirely through code.

Your Comments and Views

Jonnie said on June 11th 2008 at 12.57 pm

Hi James,

First of all, I’d like to thank you for the best review I’ve received yet. It’s really great to read your post after working on DestroyFlickr nonstop this past semester. Believe me—I’m not done updating. Because it’s being judged for the Adobe Design Achievement Awards right now, I’m not allowed to change it until June 30th. Expect to see an update prompt around that time.

As for the features, the rotated photos actually tie in with a major feature I have planned in a later release dealing with the ability to throw and group photos. And resizing/fullscreen is something I’m working on as well for the next release. Other things to expect would be savable workspace layouts for the next time you login, alternative contact sheet viewing methods, and, of course, groups and sets. Stay tuned, and thanks again.

Jonnie said on June 11th 2008 at 1.07 pm

ps – it was all done in Flex, but as an actionscript project :)

James said on June 11th 2008 at 1.20 pm

@Jonnie thanks for the correction on Flex. Did you use Flash for your asset creation or is it all drawn using AS?

Good luck on the comp and look forward to any updates that you add.

James

Jeton said on June 11th 2008 at 4.52 pm

WOW! Just WOW!

You should turn to del.icio.us and Gmail after this project.
Make then AIR-able ;)

I’m really really impressed by this.

Bill said on June 12th 2008 at 5.50 pm

Very nice work..I understand Flickr to be a wiki. Any unique challenges, good or bad while developing your app?

POPOEVER said on June 13th 2008 at 9.58 pm

Does this app connecting to developer’s site for data fetch? Cause I’m here in Shanghai can’t visit destroytoday.com, it seems the website or its host IP was filtered by our famous GFW, and after my login and authenticate the DF, it told me can’t fetch my photos.

And one more question, when DF opens, I fail to open flickr in my browser, what’s going on? The app setup something in the background?

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