Q's, Probs, Bugs - Photo Display Blocks

DonG2

[Moderators: I wasn't sure which forum to post these issues in, so feel free to move the topic to the Bugs forum if you'd rather have it there.]

Task: Display all photos from all the photo albums in my Facebook account.

My Shared mashup: My_FB_Photo_Albums

Bug

When I try to add a third Facebook block to get my Facebook account Name, using the getUserInfo function, and adding it's output to the photo display block, only one photo is displayed -- the first photo from the first album. There are a total of 18 photos in two albums available.

Since several of the photo display blocks use a "Name" field, it looks like the Facebook block should be modified so that it also returns the photo owner's Name in the getPhotos function, and maybe their Profile URL as well

I tried using the Combine block with the Facebook getPhotos block and a third Facebook getUserInfo block, but that did not work.

What would be the suggested workaround for this at the present time

Bug

I've tried every photo display block that MS provides in Popfly, but all of them mangle these Facebook-posted photos to the point where they are really bad. Both, the thumbnail images and the larger size versions, are very blurry and pixelated. You can see the original photos from links on my Profile page (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php id=709239610).

It seems that the photo display blocks do not like these JPG images that are compressed at 20% Do the photo display blocks take the image type (file extension) into account before it resizes an image I ask because there are different methods of resizing a photo based on it's type (JPG, BMP, GIF, TIF, PNG, etc.), which attempt to keep quality at it's highest level.

Is there any way to get better quality Is there a particular photo format or image size that works well with the photo display blocks

Bug

When I click on an image or the link to "display original image" (such as in PhotoTiles), a new window opens and displays yet another terrible quality, smaller-than-original, image. Why is the original image not being displayed "as uploaded" (size and quality), like it does from the Facebook View Photos links The new window URL appears to be the Facebook site, but what I see are NOT the images I uploaded .

Suggestion

In all of the photo display blocks, the text sizes being used in the output displays seems way too big to me. There is barely enough room in most of them to display three or four words, let alone a complete photo caption of two or three lines. I would like to suggest that these blocks allow the user to select a font size, from a pre-defined list of font sizes. From this user-selected font size, the Silverlight code can then select the most appropriate font face, weight, etc. for the specific control (displayed item) being used.

By the way, the Carousel block still does not allow some photos to be "brought to the front" of the carousel, as I reported in the Bugs forum a while back. You click photo A but photo B is the one that gets moved to the front. Just happened to notice it again tonight, so thought I'd mention it.

Thank you,

DonG2

-- bump --

Anyone

DonG2

Popfly Team,

It's been two weeks since I posted this message, but you have not replied to it.

Please reply

Thank you,

AndyS

In reverse order (i think...)

Carousel:
Yea that block does just make no sense when it comes to user input it's been on our "to fix" list for a while, will make sure we emphasize that it's a block people really do use.

Fonts:
I think what we're going to try to do for FontSize is pick it up from the CSS of the page and the expose a default font size propert that can be set. We haven't done this yet as Silverlight doesn't use CSS so setting it requires some Javascript and changes to all the blocks which has just been too much work to tackle .

Images In PhotoTiles:
Clicking on the image in photo tiles does just "zoom in" on that image which will make thumbnails (such as profile pictures) very ugly .

Image From Facebook:
I'm not on your friends list in Facebook so can't see your photos, I've sent a friend request though. I'll look into the image sizing soon as i can

JPEG Compression:
Off the top of my head 20% seems like a low quality rate, I don't use JPEGs that often but certainly you would see some blurring at that rate as the algorthim lumps together bigger sections. Silverlight only has native support for BMP, JPG and PNG for all else (such as GIF) we have to catch the exception then transcode it server side to png.

And sorry for the delay in replying to you . Though i still have to answer some questions.

DonG2

Howdy Andy,

Thank you for your reply.

Carousel: I think it (and the Globe) blocks are just plain "cool" 3-D type displays, which is probably why so many folks want to use them . They are different and not seen every day on the web.

Fonts: That's too bad about Silverlight not using CSS. Hope this is temporary.

"Images In PhotoTiles: Clicking on the image in photo tiles does just "zoom in" on that image which will make thumbnails (such as profile pictures) very ugly."

This isn't just a problem with PhotoTiles but all of the photo display blocks I've tried. So, what you're saying is that when the Facebook block is used to obtain photo album pictures, all it returns are the thumbnail images, and not the full-size photos That just doesn't sound right.

JPEG Compression: Off the top of my head 20% seems like a low quality rate,

That's 20% compression ... the picture is thus 80% of normal. I've been using 15-20% ever since buying a digital camera back in the late 90's without any problems.

Though i still have to answer some questions.

I look forward to your suggestions / answers Andy, especially about the three block problem.

( My Facebook Photo Albums are here: http://www.facebook.com/photos.php id=709239610 )

Thanks again,

RealHeartMozart [msft]

Hi Don,

We made some significant upgrades to the Facebook block in our last release... so you'll need to make some changes and resave before we can go ahead to work on the original "3 block" problem that you reported for your mashup My_FB_Photo_Albums.

Would you have a look

Yours,

Michael

DonG2

Howdy Michael,

Popfly won't even let me edit the mashup. When trying to open it in the mashup editor, I got two pop-ups telling me that the Facebook block had changed and that getPhotos was no longer available. After clicking OK on both of them, a crash screen appears with no buttons to go anywhere from it (see below). Tried to edit this mashup several times with the same result . So, I'm assuming I need to try and remember what I did in this mashup and recreate it from scratch

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Oops...
An unexpected error has occurred inside your web browser. Let's hope this is a temporary problem! You might want to try again to see if it goes away.

Technical Details:
'chosenOperation.outputs' is null or not an object
http://popflycreator.ms/Mashup/MashupFrame.aspx sessionToken=2ac40333-ed74-488a-a6f0-4dc92b1d802a&myBlocksToken=fc2e4992-042d-44df-8e3d-0b94256b2c29&account=DonG Line 2

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

DonG2

Also just discovered that all of my FB --> Geonames --> VE mashups are broken, along with mashups from other users such as Suzanne's My Facebook Friends mashup. The resulting VE map is blank, with no error messages.

Please also see http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx PostID=2350725&SiteID=1 .

RealHeartMozart [msft]

Hi Don,

I really appreciate these detailed reports. It looks like we missed some things in our Application Compatibility testing. I'll investigate some more in the morning and get us on the path to getting these things fixed.

Yours,

Michael

AndyS

Hi,

At first glance there does seem to be a bug with how the design surface loads with out of date blocks which causes a mistmatch and then an exception.

However, saved projects should still work as http://www.popfly.ms/users/DonG/My_FB_Photo_Albums does, saved projects include the blocks they depend upon so regardless of changes a block author might make your mashup should still run as it did when it was saved.

The first issue about not being able to edit is serious .

DonG2

That's what I thought also Andy. But the other night with mashups that used VE all I was getting was a blank VE map for a result, even with previously saved mashups. Today geonames seems to be down as I'm getting "don't shoot the messenger" errors. One of these days everything will be working all at the same time, so I can play / test some more, hopefully <LOL>.

RealHeartMozart [msft]

Hi Don,

We have a fix in an upcoming release for the problem with editing your mashup. The bug showed up if you used two blocks in a mashup where the inputs of the blocks both changed. In this case the Facebook inputs changed and you used it twice so...

By the way, I just tried a simple geonames => Virtual Earth mashup and it worked fine. Let us know if you continue to experience problems.

Yours,

Michael

DonG2

Thanks Michael .

Facebook + ConvertState --> GeoNames --> VirtualEarth does not work. It hangs in both preview mode and when run from the Project list. I tried 3 different functions in GeoNames with the same results.

It appears that when GeoNames comes across an error (like no city value) it forgets to decrement the counter .

Shared mashup: FBCSGNVE

AndyS

Hi Don,

Your spot on with the issue .

What's happening is.

Facebook getFriends executes
A counter called pendingCalls is set to the number of results from Facebook
Facebook returns a friend who doesn't have a city/state and tries to invoke geonames with it
Our input validation goes, city/state is required you can't invoke it geonames without it (but doesn't decrement the counter)

As the pendingCalls counter is above 0 our code thinks it's wating for more results so doesn't invoke Virtual Earth with the data we have. Instead it sits and waits for the results that were never requested.

On the plus side we have a fix and will be patching as soon as we can.

Cheers and thanks for your patience and insight on this :-)

AndyS

O on the compression rate I misunderstood and thought you meant it was compressed to 20% of normal which would be a lot of compression. But we don't do anything special based on the compression ratio. I'll have a look into some more though as.

Got sidetracked with the other Facebook related bugs you found .