Albert’s Got A New Bar: The BubbleBar
Toronto’s Albert Lai dropped me a piece of mail last night about the newest BubbleShare feature — the BubbleBar. This little piece of code displays a filmstrip of your Bubbleshare albums, including albums that others have shared with you, on your desktop. Mouse over any photo, and it will expand. Now you can watch all of your latest photos on your desktop while you work!
Installing the BubbleBar was painless. Just download it, and run. There were a couple of Windows firewall warnings, but that’s to be expected, since this is alpha code. I logged in to my Bubbleshare account, waited, and a few minutes later I had photos.
Cool!
The really neat thing about this is the sharing feature. When you share an album with someone else, your photos just start appearing in their BubbleBar, which makes it super easy to discover new content. No surfing to a website, or opening emails and saving attachments — the photos just appear.
The BubbleBar also includes buttons that let you create a new album, see which albums you’ve received from others, and use your photos as a screen saver. So it’s a mini-dashboard for Bubbleshare as well.
I stumbled on one of the coolest features completely by accident. Take note Albert! Hidden away in the menus is the ability to browse the pictures you are displaying on your hard disk. Just click File/Browse Local Content to see all the photos. BubbleBar actually downloads the photos before it displays them. This is a totally painless way for me to share my photos with all my family members. Bubbleshare makes it easy to upload the photos and share an album, say with my mum. BubbleBar downloads those photos to my mum’s hard disk so she can store them, or print them, or whatever. Again, it makes the process totally painless.
March 30th, 2006 at 9:03 am
Damn Alec you are fast.
You beat me to my own blog posting. Consider sending a link here:
http://weblog.bubbleshare.com/articles/2006/03/30/the-desktop-bubblebar-alpha-released-after-year-long-hibernation
Also Wade at MIT Technollogy Review alluded to the bar here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech-Hardware/wtr_16645,294,p1.html
March 30th, 2006 at 9:05 am
Yep, that “hidden” feature isn’t really meant to be hidden. =)
I guess we should make the browse local content to be more obvious.
Its actually a great little feature to enable our users to view all of their BubbleShare photos even when they are offline (i.e. traveling with their laptops, but still want to “share” their photos in person).
March 30th, 2006 at 11:51 am
Thought I’d take this opportunity to mention that your page doesn’t load properly for me at work (ads on both sides and blank center page… have to scroll way down to get to the meat), and I’m using IE 6.0.2800.1106.xpsp2. Might not have to do with IE7/Vista.
Your blog is such a different, great read….
March 30th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Thanks Kyle!
I am using the same version of IE, and it loads correctly for me. What’s the screen resolution you’re using?
March 30th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
1280 x 1024
March 30th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Hmmm… does it display correctly in 1024×768? I am using both 1024 and 1280 and it displays fine. What’s the typeface?
March 30th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Same issue when I change the resolution. The blog entries don’t start until after the last month in the Archives (August 2002).
As for the typeface, I believe the headings are in Times New Roman (or another serif font), and the body is in Arial.
Looks like it’s not handling the DIV tags (and corresponding CSS) correctly… works great from home though!
March 30th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
I had that problem too with my Wordpress blog. Turned out if the middle chunk of my theme (which was three columns) got a little too wide, IE would push all the content down to the bottom of the shortest sidebar. Didn\’t do it in Firefox. Just narrowed it a bit in the CSS and all was good.
March 30th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
I’ve seen that as well, but it displays fine for me in FF and IE now.
March 31st, 2006 at 6:30 am
[...] Alec Saunders has more about the BubbleBar on his blog. Filed under: Photo sharing, Photo, Blog Stuff, Bubbleshare @ 10:35 am # [...]
March 31st, 2006 at 7:39 am
[...] It turns out that I jumped the gun on the Bubbleshare news yesterday. Last night, while at the hockey game (the Sens beat the Rangers, handily, despite a lengthy injury list), Albert emailed me about a bunch more features they released yesterday, the day after the BubbleBar release, including captions, a mobile gateway to make it easy to upload photos from your camera phone, and a new API. There’s also a slick magnifier as well. [...]
March 14th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
What’s the screen resolution your’e using ?
Warmly,
Thordur Mocan