I don’t often take the time to post something about a piece of code I figured out or things more technical, but I frequently rely on other’s blogs, websites, tutorials for random pieces of whatever puzzle I’m working on.
Anyway, the other week I was charged with putting up a slideshow using images from a specific flickr feed. The Google AJAX Feed API is perfect for this. No flash, no plugins.
The problem is in the gfslideshow.js file they provide you will only display square thumbnails of your photos, and if you scale them up, they become hopelessly pixelated. It took me a while, but the solution is simple. Open gfslideshow.js in a text editor and go down to line 48 then simply replace “thumbnail” with “content.” (or download this one) Also, be sure only to use the RSS2 feed from flickr as the Atom feed will not work with this.
That’s it! your slideshow should now show larger images.
I’m not sure where to start on this one. First thing that jumped out at me was the mismatching (in color AND gradient) bookmark toolbar. It’s probably the same gradient as the bar above it, but it’s compressed into a third in the Y direction and is visually jarring. Then there are the out of date round corners around all the buttons and input boxes. I mean, that was the kind of thing that was cool when ‘skins’ were all the rage. Just take a look at windows media player, so many curves and bulges it doesn’t know where it’s going. The font is also very sloppy. It’s on the cusp of being too bold…or is it just fuzzy around the edges? I can’t tell. Either way it’s not too readable. But probably my biggest pet peeve of all time for any program anywhere, especially browsers, is wasted space. You can see in the screenshot that the fully expanded safari navigation, bookmark bar, and tabs take up less space than firefox in the default ‘small icon’ mode. Also, the aforementioned rounded buttons make for a lot of wasted space between them, and on top of that they’re not even necessarily evenly spaced. Included in this space waster category is the tab bar, why are there gaps between tabs?! Okay, so maybe if I have one or two open and there is extra space can there be gaps, but if I have more tabs than will fit in the bar shouldn’t the gaps go away? Nope. Apparently not.
Anyway, I can already hear you saying: “well the beauty about firefox is that you can make/install a custom ‘theme’ (read: skin), and make it look however you desire.” …True. But if that’s the case shouldn’t the default theme be so bare bones, tiny, but still functional? And besides, I’d just look for a theme that makes it look like safari anyway.
I think I’ll just stick to the real Safari for now.
