Flickr Frameworks on the iPhone

I spent the weekend modifying ObjectiveFlickr to work on the iPhone, which was mostly a matter of changing the response handling code that depends on NSXMLDocument. I was pretty much able to plug in my MCFlickrParser class, which I use in LOLCats, to create a NSDictionary structured very much like the XML document.

Yesterday I was informed about FlickrKit, which already works on the iPhone. FlickrKit seems more advanced, but it’s also a lot larger than ObjectiveFlickr. I created simple Flickr browsers using both frameworks. The FlickrKit version is 704k, while the ObjectiveFlickr version is only 148k. I’ve only tried it on the simulator and the performance seems about the same for both.

I will probably stick with OF for this project, since I would like to support Zooomr as well as Flickr and OF already seems to support Zooomr.

LOLCats 1.1 is available

UPDATE: Minutes after I posted this, I got a notice from Apple that the update has been approved and is now ready for sale.

Apple still hasn’t approved my update to LOLCats. Still no response from Apple for the second update, which I feel is pretty urgent, since it reduces the possibility of inappropriate images appearing, which I’ve received several complaints about.

I’m now getting close to another update, which adds Zooomr support.

Meanwhile, I’m working on a second Flickr-related application. I had expected to share a lot of code with LOLCats, but it turns out I’ve only reused one class, my Flickr parser.

For this app, I need to support Flickr authorization, so it seemed easier to rewrite Flickr’s ObjectiveFlickr code, which already supports authorization. However, ObjectiveFlickr depends on XMLDocument, which isn’t available on the iPhone. I’m replacing the response handling code with my Flickr parser class. When it’s finished, I’ll release the Flickr-related code (not the entire app) as open source.

On a fun note, I purposely added the LOLCATS tag to this photo of Midnight to make it to appear in the application. As a result, the number of hits on that photo are about 100x the average for my similar photos.

Midnight watching