Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

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Wednesday, March 07, 2007

(Windows) Flickr Notifier - the first RSS notifier that displays images

Have you ever wished you could track your friends' photostreams in real time? That as soon as your friends published photos, they would pop up on your desktop?



Presenting the Flickr Notifier. Actually it handles any RSS feed, not just Flickr RSS feeds. I believe this is the first RSS notifier that displays images.

Now you don't have to go to your feedreader to view your friends' photostreams - which may have too many photos to digest in one sitting. With this notifier, the pictures pop up on your desktop as shown above, in real time. So you can see what Nancy is baking, after she pulls it out of the oven. You can see what Paul's photo-of-the-day is, after he takes the snapshot.

This notifier is based on the open-source Java RSS Notifier project. It didn't show images, so I dove into the code and added them. Works fine for text feeds as well:




Download


Notes:
- Download the file, unzip it, and add rssnotifier.bat to your startup files
- I don't think it supports Atom (as a workaround, you can wrap your Atom feed in a FeedBurner SmartFeed)
- Fully configurable: height, width, feeds, etc.

posted by Jonathan at 3/07/2007 02:45:00 a.m.

13 Comments:

  • Nice. This is somewhat similar:
    http://www.rsssaver.com/

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 3/07/2007 1:53 p.m.  

  • Unrelated, but have you tried increasing the height of your taskbar? Going to a double-deck taskbar is a great way to clean up the system tray when you've got 20+ items down there - a double-deck taskbar gives you three rows of system tray icons, and gives you a lot more real-estate for displaying running apps.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 3/09/2007 7:54 a.m.  

  • tim - thx

    jonathan - interesting idea - I'll try it!

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 3/09/2007 9:10 p.m.  

  • Man, my wife is going to love this.

    By Blogger TrojanGuy, at 3/28/2007 5:14 p.m.  

  • Jeff - great!

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 3/28/2007 7:33 p.m.  

  • Hi there, how is every thing?! Your RSS is really cool, I hope you fix Vista problems soon too. I'm not a web developer, that is why I thought you might be able to help me. I'm trying to create an environment to upload my pictures straight to my website, with out changing the source every time. Then I thought it might be possible to upload my pictures to Flickr and the use a RSS reader to show them in my webpage. I have sadly failed till this moment and will be grateful if you give me a hand with it. I will appreciate any other ideas you think may help and look forward to hearing form you.
    my email address is: masoud@vienna.lanifex.com

    Thanks and cheers!
    Masoud

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 6/22/2007 5:50 p.m.  

  • Hi Masoud - Yup, Flickr has a badge you can use - I'll get in touch with you by email.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 6/22/2007 6:35 p.m.  

  • Hi there Jon!

    I just discovered your RSS Notifier. I downloaded it, unzipped it but now I am somewhat stuck. What do you mean with "add rssnotifier.bat to your startup files"? Might seem like a dumb question to you but I English isn't my first language and sometimes when it comes to computer stuff I am not sure I really understand what is said. So my question is, what do I have to do, to get the rssnotifier working for me?

    Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!

    Liisa

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 12/22/2008 8:17 a.m.  

  • Hi Liisa - This is an old project and I'm not even sure if it works anymore, but if you want to try it, put rssnotifier.bat in your Startup folder:

    - Click Start > Programs
    - Right-click the Startup folder
    - Click Open

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 12/22/2008 9:16 p.m.  

  • I installed everything like you said and rebooted, but I can't determine if RSSNotifier is running. I see no new icons. I'm running XP. I have given permission to my firewall and antivirus for your jar to run.

    Sorry if this is the 3rd or 4th repeat post. I have never used blogger before and don't know if it got posted since my G+ didn't work after I signed in with my gmail.

    By Blogger Alicia, at 6/18/2012 11:00 a.m.  

  • Hi Alicia - Ah, sorry, it's been a while since I have used this thing I made, so I'm not sure if it works anymore with Flickr.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 6/18/2012 11:12 a.m.  

  • please give a link to the original source code

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4/14/2015 2:38 a.m.  

  • Alas, the source code is long gone. GitHub wasn't available when I wrote this stuff.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 4/14/2015 8:49 a.m.  

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