Bob and I took a couple hours break this afternoon from our regular work to try and integrate pictures and ink into a Twitter client.
To recap from an earlier post, what I want to do is:
* Display thumbnails of flickr referenced photos where feasible
* Resolve tinyurls and the like so I can see what the links are actually pointing to
* Display thumbnails or web pages that are linked to where feasible
* Support ink drawings in the client which are then posted to flickr (or similar)
As I see it now, I don’t care if Twitter supports ink and photos directly. Adding these features to the clients is more than passable.
With only a couple hours at hand we didn’t get very far. One shortcut was to use the WPF-based open source project Witty. For the most part that got the basics going.
Then with a couple small adjustments we got images displaying as shown here:
Now when someone that I’m following (or myself I guess) points to an image directly or to a flickr image a thumbnail of the image is displayed. This works even if the person uses a tinyurl or similar url shortening service.
This turned out not to be too difficult. The approach we took was to change the low level custom control TweetTextBlock and derive it from RichTextBox rather than TextBlock. This gives lots more flexibility over what can be contained in the rendered tweet (since it can display a FlowDocument) as well as providing selection and copy to clipboard.
This didn’t turn out to be too difficult. Thumbnails of web pages was another matter. I tried using the new WebBrowser object in .NET 3.5, but I can’t get it to render anything to a image object. I guess I’ll need to ask around.
Unfortunately, the web page thumbnail problem took up most of the time so I didn’t get a chance to integrate in the ink yet. I’ve done this before with a Silverlight app–posting the ink to flickr–so I don’t think it’ll be too hard, I just need a couple hours of free time. Maybe this will be a good thing to do this holiday weekend.
As for now…it’s time to do the dishes.
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