Slide

In case you haven’t already guessed from some of the image links in other entries, for the past month or so I’ve been working for Slide on their Mac product. When I first started talking to Slide, I was excited by their vision — the best of Internet content, peer-reviewed, and brought to your desktop in a simple and unobtrusive strip of images scrolling across your desktop. It wasn’t clear at the time what my work situation would be after Juniper — so I started working on my own implementation if for no other reason than to explore some of the technical challenges associated with an always-on, graphically-intensive, networked application. This work became tickr for flickr, again, for no better reason than because flickr was the most readily available source of images. tickr was originally never intended to be a released product, just a fun side project and a tech demo for the guys and gals at Slide to help me land a Mac programming job here in San Francisco.

About a week after tickr’s release, someone put it on digg, and tickr wound up being my most successful noncommercial program to date. This was fantastic! tickr 2.0 (or tickRSS), was scheduled to have the ability to load both image and text content from any RSS feed. Essentially, while searching for images on flickr is fun (I think some blog called tickr “useless but great”), it’s not really very useful in the way that reading all of my RSS feeds is. The really neat thing about tickRSS was that rather than sitting down for an hour or more and slogging through 50 feeds worth of crap content, I could leave the RSS reader on the periphery of my desktop and only click through to the articles that interested me the most, those that caught my eye.

This, in a nutshell, is what Slide is, only better. There are a bunch of technical reasons why Slide is a better program than tickr was, but I’ll get to those later(*) — the primary reason why Slide is better than tickr is that Slide has a web site and a backend service that lets the user not only consume Internet content, but also publish and share Internet content. So, what was a one-way game with tickr becomes a much more interactive experience. Today’s release is the first release of Slide to which I feel I’ve contributed significantly, and I’m pretty proud of it.

Because the Slide client and service are so flexible, it can be hard to describe what Slide can do for you, so here are some things I use it for:

• … keeping track of news about Formula One Racing from Google News
• … watching for new photos uploaded to Flickr from Blake Burris and friends at CocoaDevHouse Dallas
• … getting updates when new articles are published on various food blogs
• … tracking vintage Vespa and Lambretta parts on eBay
• … near-instant notification when any of my flickr contacts upload a new photo
• … watching for new stories from SFist
• and of course, hosting photos I’ve taken.

Enough examples? Okay, so, yeah, that’s the idea. What you (or I) are interested in, Internet content-wise, delivered to your desktop in a fun, unobtrusive (ie: you can still Get Stuff Done while using it), aesthetically pleasing way. And yeah, so, this release, I think, rocks. And every day, we’re working on more stuff to make Slide better. So…

<marketing> Give Slide Mac a try, and let us know what you think. (Be sure to try our full-screen visualizer mode, we spent a bit of time on that.) </marketing>

* Geek note: From a technical perspective, Slide is better than tickr because it uses OpenGL and Apple’s awesome CoreImage, so not only does what we’re animating look better, but we do smoother animation while consuming about 70% less system resources. Slide has a server side, so we can keep the stuff you want to watch in sync across multiple computers without getting into the awkwardness of third-party Sync Services schemas. There’s more, but I don’t think I can get into it without giving away secrets, but believe me, I’d love to tell you all about it.