Thanks PcWorld.pl for the link and welcome to our polish visitors !

Thanks to Kaly for the article (click on the link below to read the article).

English : Ziipa – DIY Startup News

Japan : ikubon

Turkey : E-silber

Italia: bloginmano – Freeonline

Switzerland : Linkorama

Poland : Jacek50

Netherlands : Beertjes

Thanks to all writer for their coverage !

Don’t forget to vote for us on KillerStartups.

We detail here the two main steps :

1. Creating the XML plugin
2. Submitting to Firefox add on
3. Creating the link on the homeage

1) MyCroft helps generate your search plugin (which is a simple XML file) using a web form. Just one thing is not clear with this form, and it’s the most important, is how to pass query parameters to your URL. Either you are clever and you click “show full instructions” and read the instructions. Or, like me, you try to find out how it works. The answer is simple :

just use {searchTerms} to define your query terms. For iFaceSearch it looks like this :

http://www.ifacesearch.com/index.html?q={searchTerms}

2) Afterwards, you can download your generated XML file. The next step is to register to firefox addons as a developer, then submit your XMl file as a plugin.

After the validation step, you have to complete your module description, which can be a quite long step depending how much languages you support. Once the description completed, simply activate your module.

iFaceSearch search plugin on firefox addons

3) The next of the process is to try your module. Your module should now be in the sandbox. Try it on different browsers and if everything is all right simply change its status to beta. Then you just have to wait for a review by an editor. This is where we are.

We’ll keep updating on the status of our plugin.

What we needed :

1. Transparent background
2. Control from  JavaScript
3. Add picture on the fly
4. Add link to original picture (arrow)

Basically we hacked through the code and most of the modifications took place in actions of frame 3. The code is not well documented as Christopher mentioned on this website. Anyway there are no major difficulties to understand it, even if you don’t speak norwegian.

1) First of all, we removed the background by commenting this line :

//var bakgrunnPattern:BitmapData = BitmapData.loadBitmap("bakgrunn");

To get the transparent background (somehow not working in IE6), you have to set the wmode of your flash object to transparent, using swfobject (1.4 old version):

so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");

2) To allow control of the gallery by JavaScript, the external interface library is required in the .fla. You can find some examples here. Basically, you import the library and declare the functions you want to be accessed from JS :

import flash.external.ExternalInterface;

var connection = ExternalInterface.addCallback("addPic", null, addPicture);

With the above code, you declare the function addPicture to be callable from JavaScript with the name addPic.

3) Once the external interace loaded, we had to display picture on the fly.  The principle of the original gallery is the following : the photoHolder var holds all the description of the pictures. When pictures are loaded, byggBilder() is called to display the pictures. We removed the byggBilder() function and replaced it with the displayOnePic() function. This function does pretty much the same as byggBilder but for one picture only, allowing us to display picture on the fly, as soon as we get results from google or bing apis.

function addPicture(desc, url, urldest, pwidth, pheight) {
var num = photoHolder.length;
photoHolder[num] = new Array();
photoHolder[num].url = url;
photoHolder[num].desc = desc;
displayOnePic();
}

function displayOnePic() {
var i = photoHolder.length-1;
mc = _root.attachMovie("fotoHolder", "fotoHolder"+i, _root.getNextHighestDepth(), {_xscale:thumbStr, _yscale:thumbStr, _rotation:30-60*Math.random()});
mc.txt.text = photoHolder[i].desc;
if (Math.round(Math.random()*1) == 1) {
// tilfeldig y akse
mc._y = (Stage.height*Math.random())+(mc._height*2);
if (Math.round(Math.random()*1) == 1) {
mc._x = Stage.width+(mc._width*2);
} else {
mc._x = -(mc._width*2);
}
} else {
// tilfeldig x akse
mc._x = (Stage.width*Math.random())+(mc._width*2);
if (Math.round(Math.random()*1) == 1) {
mc._y = Stage.height+(mc._height*2);
} else {
mc._y = -(mc._height*2);
}
}
mc.newX = Math.round((mc._width/2)+(Stage.width-mc._width)*Math.random());
mc.newY = Math.round((mc._height/2)+(Stage.height-mc._height)*Math.random());
mc.oldRotation = mc._rotation;
mc.oldX = mc.newX;
mc.oldY = mc.newY;
mc.startX = mc._x;
mc.startY = mc._y;
mc.oldHeight = mc._yscale;
mc.oldWidth = mc._xscale;
mc.id = i;
mc.onEnterFrame = fotoAnimer;
mc.filters = [fotoSkygge];
mc.dragPol.onPress = drag;
mc.dragPol.onReleaseOutside = mc.dragPol.onRelease=stopdrag;
photoHolder[i].mc = mc;
lastBilde(mc,photoHolder[i].url);
delete mc;
antallBilder = i;
}

4) To add the link to the original picture, we added some parameters to the photoHolder elements, containing among others the url of the picture. We just added a standard arrow button in the fotoholder component and linked it with the url :

btn.onRelease = function() {
getURL(this._parent.urle, "_blank");
};

So that’s it for the modifications on the Polaroid Gallery. Don’t forget that the source code is available here.

Our modifications are really focused on our needs, but you can easily modify the .fla, there is nothing complicated in this one. Your comments and questions are welcome !

When you ask ifacesearch to look for faces, it asks two others cowboys, bing images and google images (Phase I). Those two cowboys gather a lot of suspicious people that might match your query (Phase II). Then our cowboys take a look at all those people, one after each other and  gun  all the not matching ones down (Phase III). That’s a tough job, but that’s the way we do it here. Just don’t mess with cowboys.

That’s why cowboy provide better results than other face search engines.