Get the SWF for your phone here (right mouse click and save target/link as…).

FlickrSearch allows you to enter a word which will then return images from Flickr related to that tag. The application goes out and gets the information needed to make the image URLs for up to 100 results, and then the images are displayed in a circular queue. You don’t get any navigation options, it is just a slide show, but you also won’t get any new network request permission dialogs. The swf is set up to constantly get images so that the connection never closes. I could queue the images, but I also decided that I didn’t want to let the memory get out of hand, so there are really ever the four images in memory at a time.

This is a collaborative project that I did with Jesse Wolfe, an engineer in the Yahoo! Prototyping group to work with the Flickr API available on the Yahoo! Developer Network. Jesse really did the heavy lifting on the project doing the PHP work to integrate with the Flickr API and convert the XML results to Flash variables.

We collaborated on the flow of the Flash Lite client application and what needs to be supplied to the server and what should be returned. While Jesse was working on the PHP for Flickr, I was working on getting the JPG2SWF code ready so that it could run on a later version of PHP (the Flickr code wasn’t really compatible with the old version of PHP that did support Flash Writer Toolkit).

We each had different needs for our clients, so this is where our implementations diverge. I’m using this in my hands-on sessions at Macromedia Max so I need a somewhat more streamlined version that reduces the overall complexity and code. Jesse is working on a more feature-rich version.

For those interested in the source, I will be giving it out at MAX, and on my blog after the conference.