onfocus

I want an image/feed reader for the iPad. I love seeing a picture every day in the Guardian Eyewitness application which looks like this:



Simple, minimalist interface with a few buttons to favorite, share, and browse thumbnails in the upper-right. You swipe to go forward/back, and you tap to show and hide the caption. The high quality pictures look fantastic on the screen.

Obviously I'd like to see this for The Big Picture, but instead of hundreds of disconnected picture-viewing applications distributed by content producers, I want to be able to subscribe to any feed with images and browse them this way. I'd like to mix these pictures with Flickr feeds, Tumblr feeds, and anything else with images.

I've wanted this feature for Google Reader forever, and Google Reader Play comes close, but I can't control what shows up there. I have a folder at Google Reader called Gallery (probably nsfw) filled with image-centric blogs like Shorpy, A Journey Round My Skull, today and tomorrow and I'd love to browse them exactly this way. And while I'm dreaming, I'd like this app to integrate seamlessly with Google Reader to share, star, and mark posts as read.

Don't make me learn Objective C, Lazyweb.

oh lazyweb, why do you mock me? I'm trying to comment on a post at lazyweb, but it says:

Your comment was denied. It contains content currently banned by my blacklist.

oh yeah? Well now you're on my blacklist, lazyweb! fwiw, here's what I was trying to say—

It's not easy. I hacked my Amazon RSS tool to do UK feeds: Amazon UK RSS. A better way would be to write your own Amazon UK XSL stylesheet. People have been asking Amazon to add UK feeds for a while now. Alan Taylor put together the RSS for Amazon.com, but he has moved on, so this feature may be on the back burner for Amazon UK.

That doesn't look like comment spam to me.

Sweet! Alf over at HubLog, hooked up Amazon.com Citations and Touchgraph: TouchGraph browser for Amazon Citations. He set it up as a bookmark, so you can launch it from any Amazon page. He also has an example set up using the book I mentioned: TouchGraph citations for Moral Animal. Since the data isn't available via the API, he must be scraping the HTML.

The coolest part: double-clicking a book reference brings that book up in the graph, and you can see which citations the books have in common.

Talk about the LazyWeb in action—thanks for the fun, Alf!

Update: Looks like the citations feature may be in flux at Amazon, so the HubLog TouchGraph browser isn't working at the moment. (It was fun while it lasted!)