Enhancing the Hilo Browser User Interface

The Hilo Browser application now allows you to share selected photos through an online photo sharing application. It also allows you to edit selected photos by launching the Hilo Annotator application. The Hilo Browser has been extended to make it easier to perform these two actions. In the first version of the Browser double-clicking (or double-tapping) on a photo launches the Annotator in order to edit the photo. The Browser now uses the double-click gesture to launch the slide show mode where the carousel is hidden and the selected photo is shown at a larger scale (Figure 1).

Introducing Hilo Annotator

The Hilo Annotator is a separate application that you can launch either directly from the desktop, the command line, or from within the Hilo Browser application itself. The Browser application was updated to support the integration of the Annotator. The user can launch the Annotator from within the Browser by double tapping on a photo with their finger or double-clicking with the mouse. This action generates a WM_LBUTTONDBLCLK message which is handled by the media pane through theMediaPaneMessageHandler::LaunchAnnotator method, by passing the name of the selected photo. Listing 1 shows the code for the LaunchAnnotator method.

Listing 1 Hilo Browser code to launch the Annotator process

Using Windows HTTP Services

Flickr Share Dialog

When Hilo uploads a photo to Flickr, it makes several calls to the Flickr web server. These calls are made to authenticate the Hilo application (and obtain a session token called a frob); to authorize the access of the Hilo Flickr application to upload a photo to a Flickr account (and obtain an access token) and then to upload the photo. These calls are made across the network, and potentially they can take a noticeable amount of time. Hilo has to wait for responses from the Flickr web server in such a way that the user is kept informed. This is the purpose of the Share dialog.

The Hilo Browser’s user interface provides a button, labeled Share (Figure 1). When you click on this button you will see the Share dialog (Figure 2), which is implemented by theShareDialog class. This class has static methods and allows you to upload either the selected photo, or all photos in the current folder. The Share dialog has effectively three sets of controls reflecting your progress through the mechanism of uploading photos. The first set of controls is shown in Figure 2. When you click the Upload button a progress bar is shown under the radio buttons (Figure 3) to display the progress of the upload; and when the upload is complete all the initial controls are hidden except for the Cancel button which is relabeled Close, and the View Photos link control is displayed (Figure 4). The same class is used for all versions of this dialog.

Sharing Photos with Hilo

Updating the Hilo Browser User Interface

Hilo’s photo sharing functionality is accessed through the Hilo Browser application. Previous versions of the Hilo Browser allowed the user to launch the Annotator by double-tapping (or double-clicking) a photo in the media pane. This worked adequately because there was just one action that could be performed on a photo. Now that there is an additional action—share—another approach must be used. In the final version of the Hilo Browser, double-tapping a photo shows the photo in the slideshow mode (Figure 1) while double-tapping the screen again returns to browsing mode.