I didn’t object when Flickr required all accounts to be tied to Yahoo!, for it didnt concern me. (I was an old-schooler with a Flickr account – but I also had a Yahoo! account. Thus, no reason to have qualms about merging them.)

I didn’t object in plenty of other cases where people would raise a stink about what they regarded as bizarre or unacceptable decisions on the Flickr team’s part.

I do object now. They have turned their sleek, simple, joy-to-use Flickr Uploadr desktop application into an ugly, bloated, several-times-the-size, several-times-the-startup-time monster of an application. Thanks.

I guess I’ll keep using 2.x while I still can (i.e., as long as they don’t break the API / add new features I want to use / etc.), and use FlickrExport in other cases. But sooner or later, the same “I have a picture, lemme upload it real quikc by dragging it onto the Uploadr” will be gone. That Uploadr is now open source is little comfort.

Oh, and Sven is wrong: the app isn’t fifteen times the size; it’s fifty times the size:

ataraxy:~ chucker$ du -ks /Applications/Flickr\ Uploadr.app
1056	/Applications/Flickr Uploadr.app
ataraxy:~ chucker$ du -ks /Volumes/Flickr\ Uploadr\ 3.0/Flickr\ Uploadr.app
50880	/Volumes/Flickr Uploadr 3.0/Flickr Uploadr.app

In true XUL style, the app also ships with beautiful bugs (despite being marked as final), such as the first menu appearing twice.

All this when the 2.x version worked perfectly fine, had an easier-to-use interface, was much faster to launch which is critical for this kind of app, and… did I mention it worked?

I believe that’s what we call progress. Not.

Via reddit: a Google Tech Talk about Wuala.

One of those “it was only a matter of time” things. Wonder how it’ll turn out.

Not having watched the entire presentation yet, I wonder whether there’s any WebDAV compatibility.

Ross Burton:

Impressively, whilst it took three and a half years for the first billion pictures to be uploaded [to Flickr], the second billion took only three months.

[..]

Second, the Flickr team have just added some new features, specifically a world map with popular tags overlaid and a new Places interface, providing a summary of a particular location. The new map has temporarily lost the ability to zoom in straight away (press Search then Go to get the zoom bar), but the Places interface is amazing fun.

Nothing to add. Just trying something like a search for photos tagged “river” in, say, Germany yields tons of wonderful pictures. And the places feature – specifically, for the place Shanghai that it happened to pick at random – led me to this:

Awesome.

Jens (Stickies, iChat, Safari RSS, etc.) ponders using Core Animation subclasses to integrate a physics engine.

In the comments, Gus suggests Chipmunk in Box2D’s stead.

Even if that’s all too technical to you, you can’t tell me you don’t enjoy this demo (though it gets a tad repetitive towards the end)!

This came up rather randomly in CyanChat.

Fonts on my computer that happen to support the Interrobang: Arial Unicode MS, BlairMdITC TT, Bradley Hand ITC TT, Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel, Courier, DejaVu Sans Mono, DejaVu Serif, Geneva, Helvetica, Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans Unicode, Meiryo, Mona Lisa Solid ITC TT, Monaco, MS Gothic, MS Mincho, Savoye LET, Stone Sans ITC TT, Stone Sans Sem ITC TT and Apple Symbols.

I would have been surprised if it had been even more than one or two. But more than two dozen? Nice!

Incidentally, myst-bert points to a list of fonts that support this character. Also, Butch confirms you can use AutoCorrect in OpenOffice.org and MS Office to automatically turn ?! and !? into ‽, for typographic effect.

This kind of thing would be great to have in SmartyPants and friends.