Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
.Mac Web Gallery on Prototype
Category: Prototype
, Scriptaculous, Showcase
As part of the Apple announcements yesterday they showed off a new .Mac Web Gallery that uses Prototype and Script.aculo.us to give you a rich web view of your photos.
Shaun Trennery blogged about the features:
The main page is a collection of album thumbnails that change as the user hovers over them. The powerful effect allows the user to quickly scan through the album’s photos without the need for a single click.
Once within an album, the photos are displayed in either a grid, mosaic, carousel or a slideshow. The user can quickly change the background colour, resize the photo thumbnails and subscribe to the galleries RSS feed. The carousel view is the same as the cover-flow album art display that iTunes and the new iPhone uses. Once the photo’s are fully loaded, its performance is really slick.
Very slick indeed.
Yuck, you mouseover and it sends a request to get the sub pics…or am I wrong?
It works in safari & ie(?), but not firefox. You need to move the cursor left to right.
Cool effect, Im going to write a mootools version
Wow….
Look at the site with an iPhone. Its really amazing!
Uh, the cover flow is in Flash.. not that impressive after all.
pretty slow .. and why don´t they wrap the quicktimes inside a flash player?
After playing with it for a while, I like it. I really love the approach with updating the hash and allowing the user to send the link, they’re using some sort of history manager right? And I also like the fake flip of the pictures, great implementation. I told one of my partners that “flipping” an element in html was pretty much impossible, but they pull it off.
@Rahual - I cracked open firebug to check the element’s style and for about a min thought that I was doing something wrong. I bet it could be done in html though…
Not impressive by any standards. Load up firebug and see that the front page is roughly about a 2mb transfer (from gallery.apple.com, 2 connections at a time for 160 request).
animations and such are rather slow, reflections are pre-rendered, and as someone mentioned the carousel is in flash, when it could’ve been easily done w/ ajax.
emehrkay,
We talked about using the hash a long time ago on Ajaxian: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-tackle-the-refresh-button
For the gallery, they are updating the hash with SproutCore: http://wiki.sproutit.com/core/show/Routes
I am seeing that it does not work in Safari 2, at least not the “scanning” part. It does, however, work in Safari 3. Kind of stupid that they don’t fully support their own official browser. Seems to work fine in Firefox 2 on OS X for me.
I guess the cool thing about this is that Apple is using Prototype and Scriptaculous to do this, more power to them.
why they don`t use packer or something like that?
none of you could have done that. shut it, it’s friggn awesome.
Not that I think most people need to test on strange browsers, but it’s probably worth it to point out going to that gallery on the Wii Browser crashes the Wii completely, to the point where you need to unplug it to get it working again.
Yet again apple adds something new to a product that just feels like it should be obvious and yet no one else has done it. I think the left-to-right rollover of a gallery thumbnail showing thumbnails of the pictures within is brilliant and I expect that soon it will be integrated into many other galleries out there–or at least be a demanded feature.
I really wish the cover flow was in js. I would really like to use this one one of my projects. Guess I need to brush up on my Flex.
I love it, but is too slow even with DSL
I guess grandma on her 56k won’t be able to see the pictures after all.
It’s a heavy load, but besides that this is one of the greatest galleries I’ve ever seen.
If you can write me that carousel in JS, be my guest.
Really slick User interface; but from the point of view of a standard aware web developer a few bad implementation choiches were made, probably for marketing/switch2Mac/safari reasons…
see the New .mac photo albums: OBTRUSIVE!
It is a heavy load, but it is damn impressive for a free web app.
With these web apps getting better and slicker all the time, Microsoft software should be obsolete fairly soon :)
Seriously the Google, Mac and Yahoo web apps are, even now, almost as solid and reliable as microsoft office equivilants, and much nicer to use
That is very impressive. Regardless of all the things you guys are pointing out it is a great idea. I am sure things will be continued to be cleaned up and optimized as the gallery evolves.
Hmmm…. on a mac..using camino and says they dont support it.
wtf? camino is the same rendering engine and javascript as firefox!
@mac hating mac user: But it says Camino and not Firefox in the browser’s user agent … And by the way, it works anyway, just go ahead!
There is a lot they could do to reduce the page weight and load time. They aren’t even minifying the javascript. I was surprised they hadn’t even stripped whitespace out of the javascript…
its really crashy on firefox here.
and slow :/
iBloat:1384requests,2.66MB
wow!,amazing!
The page loading doesn’t have to be nearly so bad. They could do a lot of simple things (like not having 128 line comments in their javascript) to make things better. They could also use a film-strip image technique to really cut down on the number of requests they are sending on load. more here: http://www.bigdumbdev.com/2007/08/build-better-gallery-skimmer-part-1.html
What a bunch of lame asses. You all sit around tearing into other people’s work that you wouldn’t have a prayer of replicating. Not to mention the fact that nothing close to this has been done before, especially by any of you. I’m no Mac fanboy but give them their props for an app that is amazing and can only improve.
-nuff said
its looks good …
but kinda slow for me …
may be coz i’m on a slow connection …
hehe …