Neothoughts

We’ve created a profile for Touchpoint Gallery on Facebook. Now you can keep track of Touchpoint Gallery’s wacky antics in your Facebook news feed.

We just launched a new version of Touchpoint Gallery with a very important new Picture Source built in: Facebook. Now you can tap into the billions of photos on Facebook and use them as your screen saver and as your wallpaper.

Using the Python client library to work with the Facebook API made it easy to offer a slew of different options in this Picture Source. It’s our most robust Picture Source yet. With it, you can retrieve any of the following types of pictures from Facebook for use in Touchpoint Gallery:

• all of the pictures that you have been tagged in
• one of your albums
• all of your pictures
• all of one of your friends’ pictures
• one of your friends’ albums
• all pictures that one of your friends is tagged in
• all of your friends’ pictures

Lots more new Templates and Picture Sources coming soon!

We put out a new version of Touchpoint Gallery today. It features support for add-ons by way of a new file format, Gallery files. This means we’ll be able to release updates a lot more frequently. In particular, we’ll be pumping out Templates and Picture Sources on a regular basis. I’m pretty excited about the prospect of distributing an application as if it were a continuous stream of content.

Kicking off that stream of app-content is a new Template. We’ve received a lot of suggestions for Template ideas from users and one of the most popular suggestions is a scrapbook. Today we released the first in a line of scrapbook-themed Templates: the Floral Scrapbook.

And the cherry on the cake: Windows Vista is now fully supported.

Norm blogged about how Touchpoint Gallery is like having infinite refrigerator space for your kids’ artwork.

Over at Touchpoint, I wrote about all of the open source software that we use on a daily basis. It turned out to be a lot more than I imagined. It made me appreciate all of the ways open source software makes my professional life easier.

But then I remembered that it also has an impact on my personal life. Lately I’ve been really enjoying an open source game called Frets on Fire, which is a clone of Guitar Hero that you play with your keyboard. It lets you create your own playable songs and also supports all the songs from Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero II. You can even use the Xbox 360 Guitar Hero II controller to play it.

As well, Xbox Media Center is perhaps the open source software that I value most. It turned my dull old Xbox into a media powerhouse, and has gone on to rule my living room. Praise be to XBMC.

Norm created a crash course for new parents who want to take awesome pictures of their kids.

As some of you know, about a year ago I quit my day-job to focus on a software startup that I co-founded with some friends. We’re called Touchpoint Studios.

Our work came to fruition recently as we have just released our first product, Touchpoint Gallery. It’s a desktop application that enables you to collect digital photos from various sources (your hard drive, a camera connected via usb, Flickr, rss, etc.) and showcase them in Templates (which are 2D or 3D environments). You can also use it as your screen saver and to automatically set your desktop wallpaper.

Computers are getting increasingly powerful, but their power is used less and less as more applications are moved into the browser. Applications such as Touchpoint Gallery take advantage of the computer’s resources (such as graphics processing) while also delivering the benefits of the web-based applications.

Now that the initial release is live we plan to produce a lot more Templates and Picture Sources. High on our list of Picture Sources to support is Facebook.

As the sole developer on this project, it has been a wild ride so far. I can honestly say I’ve never been so proud to be associated with a company or a product. There were countless times during development that I found myself distracted by the fun features of the application while I was working on it. And now that it’s out in the wild, it just makes it more exciting.

Be sure to check it out to experience your digital photos in a way you never have before. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Screen shot courtesy Flickr.