Monday, October 27, 2008

What's It All About?

I'm glad you asked...

There's an awful lot of amazing artwork, as well as just interesting or silly images, uploaded to the web every day, but who has time to click through it all? I like the idea of being immersed in all this amazing creativity, but in a passive way, like posters on the wall. I also wanted to do away with all of the clutter of your typical webpage, filling the screen with only the images. I figure something like this is great for everyone; the artists get more exposure, the viewers get more art, and the world is filled with beauty!

At first I thought maybe I should write a screensaver or an application, but then it would only work on the platform I created it with (which would be a Mac, for those of you keeping score at home). I realized that if I do it as a JavaScript webpage, it'll work pretty much everywhere. As a bonus, it'll be easier to create and more flexible to expand. So far I've been quite pleased with the results. The Ajax revolution has shown that JavaScript is a lot more powerful than most people have given it credit, but I think we're still just scratching the surface.

It's just a side project (my day job is working on Seadragon at Microsoft Live Labs), so we'll see how much time I get to work on it. I plan to add more image streams, and to expand the ones I'm already using. I also like the idea of making it work better on mobile browsers; it already works pretty well on the iPhone, but there are issues. Let me know, either here on the blog or on the Get Satisfaction page, if you've got ideas on what Gimme Shiny can become.

In the meantime, enjoy!