Flickr at SF Web Performance

Wait! Did you say they all run Webkit?
Wait! Did you say they all run Webkit? by Schill

Thanks to everyone that came out to the SF Web Performance meet up last night! For those of you that missed it, JP and Aaron were kind enough to record the entire event on Ustream.

You can also view the slides and associated blog posts for each of the presentations:

  • Optimizing Touch Performance, by Stephen Woods: slides and blog post
  • Using Web Workers for fun and profit: Parsing Exif in the client, by Chris Berry: slides and blog post
  • The Grid: How we show 10,000 photos on a page without crashing your browser, by Scott Schiller: slides and blog post

Big thanks to JP and Aaron for setting it up and running the event so well!

Join the Flickr Frontend team tonight at the SF Web Performance meet up!

Team Tinfoil
Team Tinfoil by waferbaby

We will be hosting the SF Web Performance meet up tonight at 7pm at Citizen Space. Come join us for pizza, drinks, and these great talks:

Using Web Workers for fun and profit: Parsing Exif in the client, by Chris Berry

Exif, exchangeable image file format, describes various sets of metadata stored in a photo. Really interesting metadata, like image titles, descriptions, lens focal lengths, camera types, image orientation, even GPS data! I’ll go over the methods to extracting this data on the front-end, in real-time, using web workers.

The Grid: How we show 10,000 photos on a page without crashing your browser, by Scott Schiller

Flickr’s latest Web-based Uploadr interface uses HTML5 APIs to push bytes en masse. Its real power, however, is the UI which enables users to add and edit the metadata of hundreds of photos while they are uploading in the background.

Handling the selection, display and management of large numbers of photos in a browser UI meant that the Uploadr project needed to be designed for scalability from the ground up.

This talk will go into some of the details of the Uploadr “Grid” UI, technical notes and performance findings made during its development.

Optimizing Touch Performance, by Stephen Woods

Touch interfaces are amazing. Touch devices are amazingly slow. Stephen Woods will share hard-won advice for building responsive touch-based interfaces using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. He also reveals how Star Trek: The Next Generation predicted the need for instant user feedback in a touch-based UI and how Tivos slow UI was made bearable by a simple “bloop” sound.

See you there!

We saved you a step…

It seems when we launched version 2.0 of our Flickr shapes, we posted them with a flaw which made them useless to most popular geo applications.

Awwwww…

Luckily, Christopher Manning wrote a python script which makes them useful.

Yaaaayyyyy!

The least we can do is post an update which has already been christopher-manning-ified, So, we are very happy to announce version 2.0.1 of the Flickr shape files which can be downloaded here:
http://www.flickr.com/services/shapefiles/2.0.1/

Look, it works:


Flickr Shapes 2.0.1 in TileMill

A very hearty THANKS! from your friends at Flickr, Christopher.