applejuice.
Back after two bleary months. We had a baby, as promised, and he's beautiful and brilliant. And again, no hospital!
Since our first son was born two years ago, I've posted a lot of photos for friends and family. My galleries were created with Arles Image Creator; it's a little clunky and the results aren't beautiful, but it works great and Jan is amazingly responsive to user requests.
Then I found Picasa. Picasa's a great piece of software -- maybe one of the nicest I've ever used -- but that's a separate blog post. Anyway, I got to using Picasa for photo management and quick snapshot touchups, and the extra Arles step was silly. I needed to create my galleries directly from Picasa. Except Picasa's HTML galleries are awful; obviously an afterthought that hasn't been touched in a while.
I noticed that one of Picasa's export formats is XML. Hmmm... OpenLaszlo consumes XML very well... I could probably do something with... wait, the Picasa XML is hilariously bad too. Wait again, it's all template-based! I can make up my own XML format! Hurray pathetic geekitude!
And with that, I was off writing my own photo viewer. Genius! Just what the world needs!
I almost finished, then I decided that my code needed a massive refactor before I could let anybody see it, and I walked away for a while. Keeping with my history of doing a thumbsucking project at stressful times, I made it my paternity leave project to finish the thing.
Here it is then: Applejuice beta 1. There's a sample gallery too.
Applejuice's closest peer is most likely SimpleViewer. SV is great, but I wanted a few different things. Try them both and you'll see some important differences.
I'd love to hear feedback on this little app. I made a lot of UI decisions for specific reasons, and I'm curious how those decisions translate to the real world. This is a first beta and there's plenty of room for change. I'll also post source code pretty soon so you can build yer own. (this is also a pretty decent sample OpenLaszlo app.)
I have a bunch of ideas for future Applejuice features, but I welcome input about the app itself and its Picasa integration. If you try either, let me know!