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tickr for flickr is a way to enjoy photos from flickr as they slowly glide down (or across!) one of the coveted spaces on the edge side of your desktop. You can search for photos by tag, by title and description, or by user, and tickr will scroll the photos until flickr runs out of photos to show you. In many cases, this is a really, really, really long time.

What's New With tickr

• You can combine query terms in either "all" or "any" modes. The default query mode is "all", which means the images returned will match all of the tags you enter, separated by spaces. To do an "any" search, prefix the query with the pipe (|) character. For example "|cheese crackers" will return images matching either cheese or crackers.
• The position of tickr's window is now configurable using the menu items in Window > Position in the main menu bar. You can position the window on the right, left, or bottom sides of your desktop, and by desktop, I mean all of the displays which are connected to your Mac.
• The size of tickr's window is now configurable using the menu items in Window > Size in the main menu bar. Choose from Tiny, Small, Medium, and Large window sizes. When tickr shows you photos, they will scaled appropriately for your window size. Using a smaller window size is a great way to improve performance on older Macs.
• The window level of tickr's window is now configurable using the menu items in Window > Level in the main menu bar. You can choose between Always on Top, or above all other windows; Normal, or on the same level as all other windows; or Always Behind, which is behind all other windows.
• tickr's window can be made Semi-transparent, Mostly Transparent or Opaque (ie, normal) using using the menu items in Window > Transparency in the main menu bar.
• You can also choose to search for photos By Tag, By Text, or By User using the menu items in Photos > Search in the main menu bar. Previously, these options were only available in the little menu attached to the search field in tickr's window.
• You can choose to order the results of your photo search using the menu items in Photos > Sort in the main menu bar. You can order your search results By Date Taken, By Date Posted, By Interestingness (the default), or By Relevance.
• Report a Bug has been renamed to Report Bugs to stuffonfire.com and moved to the Help menu.
• If you're going to send a bug report (or if you're just curious as to what tickr's up to), you can have tickr log (almost) everything it does by ticking the Console Logging menu item in the Help menu in the main menu bar. You can then read the log using the Console application, which is found on your computer in Applications > Utilities > Console. Copying and pasting anything in Console that says "tickr" is a great way to help me improve tickr in future releases.
• In tickr 1.0, the image size was shown when mousing over an image; in 1.1, this has been removed to reduce the amount of information we fetch from flickr and improve load time.
• For 1.1, the Related Links contextual menu item has been removed while I figure out what to do with it. The top 10 web hits from a search engine were usually not very useful, and increased load times significantly.
• For 1.1, tickr's frame rate (the number of times it draws to the screen per second) has been bumped up from 20 to 24. This will cause tickr to use more system resources than it did to show you the same images in 1.0, but the quality of the animation should be better. I made this decision because you can now shrink the tickr window to a smaller size to decrease the load tickr puts on your Mac, and faster Macs are on their way.
• This Help document. Yay!

Finding Photos

I've tried to make tickr as simple to use as possible; at the most basic level, just move the mouse cursor into the tickr window, type in a tag, and wait for photos to show up. That's nice, and tags like "penguins", "fish", or "bears" can be pretty relaxing. To narrow down your search, you can add additional tags by separating the tags with spaces, e.g., "emperor penguins", "tropical fish", "koala bears". If you're looking for something that has a space in the name, such as San Francisco or jumbo shrimp, flickr's tag system works by stripping out spaces, so type "sanfrancisco" or "jumboshrimp". (Hint: it's probably best to try both "san francisco" and "sanfrancisco" if you really want to see everything, because people seem to tag photos both ways.)

In addition to searching by tags, you can also search by free-text, which will search the title and description of photos, as well as by a flickr username, which will show you only the photos from the flickr user with the name you enter. These options can be set using the menu items in Photos > Search in the main menu bar, or using the little menu attached to the search field in tickr's window.

You probably don't want the results of your photo search to come back in a random order (or perhaps you do! Ask for this feature if you do), so you can choose to order the results of your photo search using the menu items in Photos > Sort in the main menu bar. You can order your search results By Date Taken, which uses the date stamped to the image file by the camera (and seems to be frequently wrong); By Date Posted which uses the date on which the photo was added to flickr (which is invariably right); By Interestingness (the default) which shows you the most interesting photos first; or By Relevance.

Things To Do While Watching Photos

You probably want to know a little more about the photos you're seeing, so you can point to them with your mouse and see the title the photographer gave the image, the tags which people have given the image. If you double-click the image, its flickr page will open in your web browser.

tickr's contextual menu deserves a little discussion. By right- or Control-clicking on an image, you can bring up a contextual menu from which you can pause and resume the tickrshow, open the image's flickr page (same as a double-click), open a larger version of the image, or open the photographer's photostream page. All of these options will open a new window in your favorite web browser. You can also copy a link to the image's flickr page (great for showing your friends an image in Newspeak!) or copy the image itself to the clipboard. If you save the image to your Pictures folder, they'll be saved in a subfolder called tickr Downloads.

Photos from flickr can be nearly endless, but maybe you'd like to get up and get a soda? Choosing Pause from the photo contextual menu will stop the flow of photos until you choose Play from the photo contextual menu. You can also pause and play tickr by pressing the space bar while tickr is the frontmost application and you've clicked on a photo. Be sure that you're not typing into the search field when you do this, though tickr will try to ignore stray space bar presses.

Finally, the last thing to know about tickr is that it tries to never show you the save image twice. In order to do this, tickr maintains a cache of URLs which refer to the photos you've seen. If you use tickr a lot, you may notice that tickr starts to show you fewer and fewer photos for your search tags. This is because the world isn't taking enough photos to match your rate of image consumption. You can reset tickr's cache by choosing Empty Cache from tickr's application menu in its main menu bar.

Customizing tickr for flickr

tickr gives you a couple of options which should help you tailor tickr's appearance to suit your Mac desktop experience. Firstly, the position of tickr's window is now configurable using the menu items in Window > Position in the main menu bar. You can position the window on the right, left, or bottom sides of your desktop, and by desktop, I mean all of the displays which are connected to your Mac.

Next, the size of tickr's window is now configurable using the menu items in Window > Size in the main menu bar. Choose from Tiny, Small, Medium, and Large window sizes. When tickr shows you photos, they will scaled appropriately for your window size. Using a smaller window size is a great way to improve performance on older Macs.

Thirdly, the window level of tickr's window is now configurable using the menu items in Window > Level in the main menu bar. You can choose between Topmost, or above all other windows; Normal, or on the same level as all other windows; or Bottommost, which is behind all other windows.

Finally, tickr's window can be made Semi-transparent, Mostly Transparent or Opaque (ie, normal) using using the menu items in Window > Transparency in the main menu bar.

If there's something else I can do to make tickr fit in better on your desktop, ask me for it. Most little things like the above customization options are fairly trivial to do, so you won't be ruining my weekend.

tickr Performance

A quick note on performance, eye candy and battery life: tickr's scrolling is not always perfectly smooth, and this has a lot to do with the fact that I've tried to minimize the total load on your system rather than guaranteeing smooth animation. In my tests I saw tickr averaging about 8 or 9% CPU utilization when only scrolling (loading photos from the network adds additional processing time, of course) on G5 systems and just under 15% CPU utilization on G4 systems. I think this is relatively reasonable, but if you are low on battery power, by all means, hide or pause tickr and its resource consumption will drop to nearly nil.

There are a lot of places where tickr could go from here. I have a number of ideas, but I'm very interested to hear yours.

Credits

tickr is developed by David Young | [ Email ]

tickr depends heavily on user feedback for new ideas! Thanks to blog commenters, e-mailers, people on the street, etc.

The tickr QA team is: Mark Miller, Jay Craft, Chris Lambertus, and James Sanford. Hooray for them!