Flex2 (beta 2), Flickr, Gooogle mashup

I thought I would share this photo/map application that I've been working on for a few a few weekends now. It's my buzzword bingo app, a Flex2, Flickr, Gooogle mashup.

Snoopy in the desert
download the flex 2 beta 2 player

Some of you might remember a photo/map application I did a few years back. (Yes I'm a sucker for maps.) However, that was before the flick api and google maps were released. Not to mention it was very slow. With Flex2 and the flickr/google apis that are out there now, this was a lot easier to do. Thanks to flex2 I had a working prototype in just a few hours. And the experience is a lot better too. The first time around just finding and displaying a map was a pain, this time it was the easy part. And with the flickr api I didn't have to write any back end code to parse thousands of photos. Instead I just needed to spend many nights uploading them all to flickr (I still have more to upload but I reached my flickr monthly limit already, I need to wait for May to finish).

I'm not done yet, some of my future plans include:

• Allow others to link to this app, to show their own geotagged flickr photos. (I need to speed it up, and document the url params)
• Speed up the flickr http calls with some server side threading. (flickr wants you to make a separate request for each photo to get the exif/tag data = SLOW)
• Add support for Yahoo and ESRI maps too.
• Add a regular flickr photo browser
• Make a better looking slideshow popup (anyone have one already?)
• Add some kind of timeline slider, like the one on google finance. (anyone have one already?)