Welcome back from spring break. Just before I took off, I saw a few cool projects at the senior CS project fair:
Atlas (by Steve Garrity et al) was awesome (steve, got a link to that?). Bascially it was an app that figures out where you are using WiFi triangulation and tells you who else is nearby and what events are going on there. Similar to a concept we discussed a while back.
Photos@Stanford (http://photos.stanford.edu) is a pretty nice online photo album which they claim Julie Lythcott-Haims is interested in. Could potentially work with groups@stanford?
Zonic (http://zonic.stanford.edu) is a collaboratively filtered music recommender that runs as a WinAmp plugin. Worth checking out.
I can’t access photos.stanford, but my hunch would be that any photo application worthy of a senior CS project is too complex for most end users.
For groups, I’m currently thinking of a system that simply displays all the images in a given folder. No manipulation, no categories, just thumbnails linked to images.
Can someone who’s seen the photos.stanford app describe it a little more?
No good link for Atlas yet (we haven’t built any sort of documentation for it, although I’ve got at least some PDF summary-type stuff that I’ll post in the near future), but I’ll bring a demo to the first meeting this quarter for anyone interesting in checking it out. The whole codebase is *really* proof-of-concept more than anything, but it’s fun to look at. :-)
Re: photos.stanford, the interface is surprisingly simple–I didn’t play with it much, but IIRC you can upload images (essentially one at a time, I think :-( ), and it will automatically thumbnail them (note–would be interesting to see if they’re really thumbnailing behind the scenes, or simply setting IMG tags to make it smaller…) and display a gallery. It does include some sort of category/commenting option, permalinks, and privacy controls of some sort.
My biggest question about this would be how it compares with existing software–I’d imagine that there are free open-source apps out there right now that do this; how is photos.stanford different? The key difference I see is SUNet Auth integration (re: privacy settings). I would imagine that it is less stable that necessary for a production app–at least, that’s the trend with most senior projects–but definitely worth looking into.