Danny Novo
Hello, enterprising software writers. In short: I want a .Mac-free version of the .Mac screensaver module. And I have $100 to throw at you.
I own a Mac OS X machine. I subscribe to Apple’s .Mac service. I do so for exactly one feature: the .Mac screensaver. This feature works thusly: I designate an album in iPhoto, hit “.Mac slides”, upload the photos, go to my screensaver in Mac OS X, designate my .Mac member ID, and voila, screensaver of the photos with complete Ken Burns Effect. Anybody with Mac OS X can subscribe to this screensaver if they know my member ID. Like the Grandmas.
This costs me $100 per year.
If you write a program to do this, I will pay you $100 (what .Mac cost me this past year) to be able to use it. Make it freeware, make it shareware, make it open source, I don’t care. Just give me a working copy and I will send you $100.
Here are the specs.
$100 for a screensaver module for Mac OS X (Tiger at the very least, older versions at your discretion), that will pull jpgs (add other file formats if you like!) from a designated directory on the web and store them locally on the user’s machine, then display them full screen using the Ken Burns Effect (or some other similar–but not copyrighted–effect, like the Bobby Joe Zoom Pan Dealio with Fade Transitions).
$25 bonus money for a Windows screensaver module that does the same thing, but on Windows XP.
$25 more bonus money for a plugin for iPhoto 5, so I can select an album and export it to the directory on the web that I designate. The plugin should automatically reduce the size/quality of the photos as they are uploaded, so transfer is quick.
Please?
Anyone?
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Hi,
Neat idea but I can’t believe it hasn’t been done already. I am only learning Cocoa (for OS X) now but I could make the version for Windows XP without any issue. Would you be interested in only a WinXP version?
Eric
Eric,
Alas, the target audience (Grandma and Grandma) are both on Macs. Mostly I wanted to stop paying Apple for the privilege. Aunts and cousins are on Windows XP, so that would be a real bonus, but not the primary aim.
Then again, I don’t see why a Win XP version couldn’t be built separately. I have looked around for something like that for WIndows, but everything I have found will build a slide show from a bunch of images, then package it as a screensaver that you have to send to people. I want it to pull pictures from a dir on the web, and change dynamically when the contents of the remote folder change.
The .Mac version reads a txt file in the folder that lists the contents of the folder. When publishing the slideshow to .Mac, iPhoto resizes the images and uploads them, but also writes said txt file and uploads it.
So, just writing the screensaver module portion might be difficult, without a txt file of the dir contents. But if it is not, or even if it is and I have to write the txt file by hand… go for it!
$25 would be yours for my own license to use it. Though, it would be nice if it were freeware so the aunts and uncles wouldn’t have to pay for it.
Can I access this folder of images on your .Mac site without a username and password to take a look at the structure?
Yeah… here is a link to the config.plist file that is written by iPhoto. It lists the filenames of the images, which are also in that same directory (i.e. at the same level as the plist file)
http://homepage.mac.com/rdnovo/.Pictures/Slide%20Shows/Public/config.plist
I actually have a project that might be able to do that. Take a look at http://gregschwartz.net/wiki/funnel and you can try it out. It can’t work with the files like the one you linked to, but I could alter it to make it work with that, if you want. (I don’t really care about the money, I want people to help on the project and people to use it!)
It uses Java 1.5, and mainly supports RSS feeds, though I think it should work on Atom and just about anything else you throw at it. Let me know what you think.
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