I was browsing through the list of Facebook applications written in Java the other day, and happened to stumble across Bloom: “The best Facebook photo uploader!”
I was a tad surprised, because it appeared to be (a) open-source (it had a link to the source code in one column) and (b) there already is a Java application to upload photos to Facebook. I know this, because it was written by me!
I was going to write up a rant about open-source projects never getting anything done if people don’t bother joining other projects, but – on further investigation, it seems like “Bloom” isn’t open-source. Can you see a link to the source code, or any reference to it, anywhere on the site? I certainly can’t. So I’ve edited the Facebook wiki and removed the link (well, if it’s not open-source, the link is invalid).
I’m not quite sure whether the guy who wrote Bloom was aware of my uploader before writing his. Bloom does now have more features (including some not related to uploading, such as browsing through photos), although it does seem a bit complicated to use – I don’t think it will win any GUI design awards (neither will mine, to be fair).
Anyway, inspired by Bloom and jUploadr (and upload tool for Flickr also written in Java) I have released a new version of the Facebook Photo Uploader which lets you drag and drop photos onto the upload panel, rather than selecting them using a file browser. I don’t know whether I’ll implement any of the other features though – I do like the file browser, and being able to rotate / resize things in-memory is good, but whether they would be useful or not I don’t know.
I’ll stop rambling now anyway 🙂
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