SlideShowPro News

08.17.06 | Flickr support to end

Update: This post is no longer accurate, for the developers of Flickr changed their mind! Everything is fine.

I had a feeling a day like this would come, but it came much sooner than expected. Flickr is removing their crossdomain policy file in "the next couple of days" and will force all Flash applications to load data through their API at api.flickr.com.

What does all this mean? It means that without a crossdomain file hosted at Flickr.com, SlideShowPro will be unable to load RSS feeds. Which means, you guessed it, no photos from Flickr.

I wouldn't make a big deal out of this if my application were a pet project, but we're talking about lots and lots SWFs containing SlideShowPro all across the web right now that will soon be breaking. Poof! Oh, sorry, were you using that?

So like everything else in life, here's the bad news and the good news.

The bad: SlideShowPro and all of its documentation (user guide, help documents) will have to be revised immediately to remove Flickr RSS support, and an updated version will be pushed out very soon to prevent new users from having problems. Old users, the ones with SWFs currently loading RSS feeds from Flickr, will need to use a third party script like FlickrSSP to now load content from Flickr.

I have researched the possibility of writing my own API parser in ActionScript to get around this, but the markup would be incredibly verbose, and would make the byte size of the component way larger than I'm comfortable with. (To prove my point, the open source Flickr API AS2 wrapper Flashr is nearly 300k of code).

Which leads me to the good news.

The good: By removing the Flickr RSS parsing from the component, every SWF published will be a little smaller, for a lot of unnecessary code can now be deleted.

Expect to see a new update pushed out sometime this weekend.