Here’s a 14MB video of Mugshot in action. Performance right now ain’t that great - but I haven’t done much to try and alleviate that yet - it’s way too early. I’m having to constantly weigh how much bandwidth and disk space I’m sucking up by caching several sizes of photos. On one hand, having more sizes cached speeds up the several different types of drawing I need to do. Note the detail pane - when you select multiple photos, it shows you a collage of those photos along with some of the common data. I need the “square” version for that. The main photo layout needs at least one other size - right now that’s just the “thumbnail” size, but I’ll probably do the same dynamic-resizing thing that Delicious Library and iPhoto do… which means I’ll need easy access to one of the larger sizes - either “small” or “medium”. Or both. On the other hand, sending out requests to download 3 sizes of a hundred photos (or more) at once, drains performance.

Right now, the other performance drain is my CoreData store. I haven’t been very careful about how I’m thrashing through the data I’m storing in it. I know I could approach that problem a little more carefully and improve performance. I’m storing just about *everything* Flickr is willing to send me so that I don’t need to update any code in the future if I decide to start using that data. But after a few days of use, an XML store gets to about 6 MB and launching the application starts to take a minute or so. Again, it’s something that I’m keeping in mind, but probably won’t tackle until I’ve gone a few more features done - and I can more accurately see how data is flowing through the app.

Speaking of caching, one of the requests I’ve had is to be able to quickly scrub through photos: roll your mouse along the main photo layout and see a larger size quickly - almost like the “loupe” feature of Apple’s new Aperture app. I’m starting to implement that - and I think it’ll be pretty cool. When you mouse over the thumbnails, you get a floating version of the “medium” or “small” size - it follows the mouse. But, of course, that means I have to cache those sizes. If I go through and load every photo I have access to - my stream, my contacts streams, and 5 or 6 groups - my cache folder grows to about 50 MB. Is that too much? I don’t know.

I still have a LONG way to go before I’m anywhere near completing this project, but I’m having a blast. I’m making decent progress - although, since this is basically my first Cocoa project, I’m sure the code is way messier than it needs to be. Onward and upward!