tomputer

In my last post I gave my first impressions of the BT eFrame1000 – a wifi equipped digital photo frame, and I hinted that I’d started to investigate how to exploit a feature that’s intended for streaming Flickr photo albums so that I could view information from other sites. So far, I’ve had some success at cajoling the frame into displaying pictures from sites other than Flickr, and showing news and weather updates. Here’s how…

Background

The eFrame 1000 has a feature that can be configured (via the Windows PC software) with URLs for Flickr photo albums. Once configured, you can go to the frame and select Photos > Flickr > [Album Name] to stream the photos in that album directly from Flickr over your wireless network without needing a computer to be switched on. All references to this feature on the frame, the PC software and in the documentation specifically refer to Flickr and Flickr only (I suspect that’s because Yahoo! (who own Flickr) have a partnership with BT who make the frame and the two companies co-brand some of their broadband products). This feature works because each public album/stream/group on flickr has an RSS url that users can subscribe to in order to see the 20 most recent uploads.

Non-Flickr feeds

A flickr RSS feed contains a link to each image (and a smaller thumbnail version). It turns out that although it’s not a documented feature, you can configure the frame to use any RSS feed that’s in the correct format and the frame won’t care that it isn’t coming from flickr.com. Be warned though, you can’t just take a regular RSS news feed, it has to be a feed where every item contains an embedded image in the same format used by Flickr e.g:

<media:content url="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3483/3290803901_527112a24e_o.jpg"
type="image/jpeg"
height="1920"
width="2560"/>
<media:thumbnail url="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3483/3290803901_9178782db5_s.jpg"
height="75"
width="75" />

I haven’t yet determined whether the media:thumbnail tag is used.

Frame Channel

The best site so far has been FrameChannel.com. This is a service designed for wifi picture frames whereby a user creates their own channel by subscribing to “widgets”. It’s intended for framechannel specific frames that will make full use of their API to control slideshow speed, transitions, order etc, but they also provide an RSS feed in a format that works with the eFrame. So, if you subscribe to a weather report, you configure the widget on the frame channel website with your location and then the RSS feed for you channel will contain an image that is created by the weather widget to show your local forecast. Similarly the reuters news widget will generate an image in the feed containing a brief headline and associated picture. The RSS feed is a little hidden away so here’s how you find it: Sign in to your framechannel account. Configure your channel. Go to “My Account”. Copy the feed url that appears just below the tab bar into your browsers address bar and load the feed. Then drag the url from your address bar into the flickr feed url box in the eFrame software and click “Update”  – that will download the configuration to your frame. Then in future on your frame you can go to Photos > Flickr  and you’ll see an album named something like “FrameChannel content for…”.

Other sites

I’ve had some success at finding other sites that work with the eFrame. I’ll keep the list below up-to-date as I find others.

Tick/Cross images from FamFamFam Silk library.

Potential Gotchas

I had a few issues with the PC software for the eFrame in that when I tried to load a feed that it didn’t like, it then subsequently failed to accept any other feeds (even valid ones) and just failed silently without any error message. I had to shutdown the sofware (from the system tray) and restart before it would start accepting new feeds again.

This week I bought a digital photo frame. I’ve been tempted to get one of these for a while but been put off until now for a few reasons:

• The “affordable” screens are either very small or very low resolution (or both).
• I run XBMC on my old Xbox so can view every photo I’ve ever taken on the 37″ LCD in the living room anyway.
• Cropping and copying images to a memory card and transferring to the frame seemed like too much hassle.

Frames equipped with WiFi provide a solution to the issue of transferring images to the frame and have been around for a while now but are usually expensive and often tied to a specific photo sharing site or need an ongoing subscription. Enter the BT eFrame 1000 which until recently was £130, but last week I noticed has been reduced to just under £40 (less if you happen to work for said company and get an extra few pounds staff discount, ahem! End of disclaimer). At that price it’s comparable to the run-of-the mill unbranded, low-res screens and I decided was worth a punt. It arrived yesterday and here are my initial thoughts…

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It’s taken me a while I’ll admit but I’ve just got around to releasing the sourcecode for the XBMChumby widget I wrote which displays the XBMC “Now Playing” queue on the Chumby. I decided early on that my very basic skills as a flash/ActionScript developer weren’t up to developing this to it’s full potential so now if anyone is interested in taking it further please checkout the code and get in touch if you have any problems building it etc etc etc.

The sourceforge project page is: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmchumby/

…or you can point your CVS client at xbmchumby.cvs.sourceforge.net

After a couple of days playing with my new Asus EeePC 901 I was left more than a little disappointed: The innovative multitouch mouse pad was limited by the provided drivers – two-finger scroll would work but not pinch-to-zoom. The browser would crash if I tried using any flash recording in websites like youtube or ustream with the in-built webcam. The performance seemed a little sluggish when swapping between applications or even between browser tabs, and I’d describe the interface as something I’d expect to see on a kids “my first laptop” – poor quality icons and use of colour. I also found the default Xandros Linux operating system to be cumbersome – the update manager failed to install updates that it told me were available and it was incredibly difficult to install applications not listed in the update manager. Then when I told the thing to shutdown, sometimes it would but sometimes it would refuse to turn off the power and just sit there with black screen. I spent two whole hours installing seven different packages just to install Firefox 3, and then a further hour changing the Firefox shortcut in the application launcher to load version 3 instead of 2. I thought Linux was supposed to be user friendly these days!? I was left wondering whether perhaps these were just compromises I would have to accept for the portability and battery life that the EeePC could provide?

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I ordered an HTC S710 last week (arrived Friday) on the BT Total Broadband Anywhere package. It’s a Windows Mobile 6 Standard smartphone (no touch screen, but a nice slide-out qwerty keyboard). I’ve used the PocketPC OS before on PDAs but never on a phone and so I had the obvious concerns about running a version of Windows on my main handset. Initially the responsiveness of some of the menus seemed a bit slow and accessing some of the common features like “compose new message” seemed more long-winded than I’ve been used to (I’ve been exclusively a SonyEricsson user for the past few years). After a few days use I’m starting to know my way around the menus though, I’m finding ways to customise the interface with shortcuts and I’ve installed a few new apps to provide the functionality I want.

I plan to post more feedback on the S710, Windows Mobile 6 and any useful software/hints/tips over the coming weeks. If you’re interested, you can view all S710 posts or subscribe to a feed.

Disclosure: Yes, I happen to work for BT, but I’m not directly involved in the Total Broadband Anywhere project and the opinions expressed here are entirely my own.