TomTheGeek

All the geeky stuff that gets me hot.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Slickr: Greatest Screensaver of all time is out of beta

I really mean it, this is the greatest screensaver of all time. Slickr is a free screensaver that takes the power of Flickr and displays some of the best pictures on the web right on your desktop. Slickr can be setup to pull images from a specific user, group or just the most interesting images on Flickr.

That last one is what makes it so great. Flickr rates a pictures "interestingness" based on how many views, notes and comments an image has. Therefore the most interesting pictures on Flickr are literally the best pictures out of millions contributed by thousands and thousands of people on the web. Since people are always adding more pictures the most interesting keeps changing so there are always fresh new pictures to look at.

I've tried a couple Flickr screensavers and this one is the best. The pan and scan feature zooms in on the image then pans around slowly making a great slideshow. Since you can set it up to use use only pictures from a user or a group a family could create their own group. Everyone adds their baby pictures of whatever to that group and presto, automatic picture sharing!

The new features in 1.0.1 are:
  • If pan disabled, then the image does not fill screen (i.e. is not cropped)
  • Slickr Console, very new and possibly buggy
  • Shortcuts to Screen saver, console, and settings via the start menu
  • Added override proxy support
  • View time > 120 seconds, now moves up by minutes 119, 120 seconds -> 3, 4 minutes -> 1 hour
  • If connection error, then it will show cached images (instead of stopping on the current image)