idea

A while back I posted an idea of mine.  Specifically, I suggested that it would be nice to have an easy way to upload photos to Facebook from Windows Photo Gallery.

Well I just found out that there has been a plug-in developed for Windows Live Photo Gallery for exactly this.  It even covers the most important of the features I had laid out.  Nice to see.

Here's two ideas for IE7 tabs:

• Let me drag a tab to the taskbar to move the tab into its own window.  I would use this if I wanted to move a website on my second monitor and look at another on the first one.  Way easier than copying the URL, opening another window, and pasting the URL.
• Add "Move to new window" items to each tab's right-click menu.

It would be great if I could have another button on IE's download box (or this could be a Firefox extension I guess).  Right now there are Open, Run, and Cancel.  My pick for a 4th one is Unzip.  It would download the .zip file, do a standard unzip like when you right-click on a file and Extract All, and then delete the original .zip file.

As I dragged some photos out of Windows Photo Gallery into a folder so that I could upload them all to Facebook, where I then manually tagged them and added captions, I wondered why there isn't a program that could do this.  It should be possible now given Facebook's Application Platform.

Features:

• Can upload any grouping of photos from WPG as an album to Facebook.  If more than 60 pictures are there, due to Facebook's 60/album limit, automatically break them into separate albums (Example 1, Example 2, etc.).  Also prompt for a name name of the album(s).
• Carry tags, names, and captions over to Facebook.  For example, if I have a tag for Aaron Axvig in WPG, it should automatically tag me as in the picture on the Facebook side.  Ideally WPG would support placement of tags like Facebook does, but that might be tricky, so I'd settle for some sloppiness on the Facebook side.
• Keep track of what's been uploaded to Facebook already, so I could potentially have it automatically keep all my photos on there.
• Is a plugin for WPG (assuming WPG supports plugins or extensions of some form, otherwise a standalone app could work but would have to re-implement a lot of stuff that's already in WPG).

 

Also, how about something that adds in support for creating albums in WPG?  (Again, assuming some sort of plugin model exists.)

I was thinking the other day.

(Whenever I talk about how I was thinking sometime, I think of the 101 Dalmations animated movie.  The two crooks, Horace and Jasper are sitting in their car, and the fat one says, "You know, I've been thinkin'..."  The skinny one promptly bops him on the head, and say, "Now what have I told you about thinking!  I'll do the thinkin' around here.")

Anyways, no, I don't want to tell you about a 101 Dalmations WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) application that would be neat.  It's actually a type of game.  I think any game in this genre would be conducive to using the WPF framework.

And the winning genre is...Space Strategy.  Also known as Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate games, or 4X for short, these are the ones where you start with a home star system and expand with colony ships to other star systems, which you in turn use to gather resources and construct more colony ship, etc. etc. until you have a massive army and you annihilate the other players who are trying to do the same thing faster than you.  Some of the more popular titles are the Master of Orion series, the Space Empires series, and Alpha Centari.

So why do I think this type of game could be well done in WPF?  Well, they are mostly dialogue driven, and don't use any fancy 3D graphics.  So if you made all the menus fade in with scaling effects and such that would be pretty cool.  But besides looking cool, it would scale better to different size monitors.  From what I've seen, the interfaces of these games have so many buttons and different things to click that they have a rather fixed arrangement.  This would make things look significantly different on an ultra-high resolution, for example.  With WPF, all your graphics would be vector based, and the game would be able to fill a large screen without running the monitor at a non-native resolution.

Also, WPF seems to be pretty flexible (powerful) with layouts.  So it would be pretty easy to do customizeable toolbars, I'm thinking, or even something like the ribbon interface in select Office 2007 applications where the appropriate buttons come sliding in, depending on whether you have selected a planet or a ship.  (You should see the menu in Space Empires IV.  There are over 40 buttons on the top of the screen, always there.  They do have a decent solution in that only the ones you can use at any given time light up, but there is always room for improvement.)

Whether such a game could actually be economically written in WPF I really have no idea.  I imagine it would require a computer roughly along the lines of something capable of running Aero Glass to get anything playable.  And whether programming such a beast would be fun (a lot of angle brackets for the XAML) is doubtful, but I suppose designing one in C++ is also not too exciting.

Just another idea I thought I would throw out there.

I had a pretty good idea today.  It relates to Dream Scene, a feature of Windows Vista Ultimate.  It is a desktop background that uses videos & animations, so that you can have animated backgrounds.  The only one I've seen in action was a sunset scene of a lake, with the waves rippling, and I'll admit it was pretty cool (resource consumption aside).

So I think there should be one of these that does the Matrix thing.  You know--the water-falling green symbols.  Neo would be happy.