shozu
ShoZu Desktop
ShoZu have now put up the first beta release of ShoZu Desktop, an Adobe AIR based application that I have been working on since AIR was in beta. It should run on any platform that Adobe have an AIR runtime for, currently PC or MAC, and allows you to upload photos and videos to all your favourite ShoZu destinations.
You can either use the ShoZu account that you created for your cellphone and Desktop will pick up the destinations you have already have, or you can create a new ShoZu account and just use ShoZu Desktop to upload your media. The Desktop app will allow upload to any of the destinations that ShoZu supports and you don't have any extra mobile data charges (which is personally why I started the project). It currently supports photo and video upload along with titles, descriptions and tags (depending on the feature set supported by the destination you are uploading to).
The app is the first beta release and you can find out more on the ShoZu Desktop Information Page
It would also be great to get some feedback on the app, so that it can be developed and enhanced from the ideas of the people that use it.
If you do have any comments, constructive one of course :-), you can leave then on the ShoZu User forum.
Processing ShoZu Video uploads
I have been looking into how I can transcode my ShoZu video uploads so that they all get converted into 1 format ( flash video). But to do this I need to move my site to another server that supports the app I need to do the transcoding. This will be happening over the next couple of weeks after I have done some transcoding testing and sorted out a new theme for my site move.
Quick Update
I have now started to generate some content for the Share-It module book so those interested can see what has been going on and how I have approached the project so far.
Video upload now supported
So a little more progress, I now have ShoZu video uploads working to my blog. The first attempt can be seen here. I have used an embedded quicktime wrapper to enable the videos that are uploaded to play and it seems to work OK from my Nokia N73 (using 3gp files). I still need to do some tests using mp4, but need to be careful on the file size as I have set up a small upload limit on my site.
ShoZu Share-It update
I have been testing a few updates to my Share-It plug-in, first to make sure that if I created another user account and blogged to that it still worked OK , which it does.
And secondly I have now added an Admin menu option to allow the definition of the width and height of the image that is added to the blog entry. The admin setting will only affect new uploads as it is used to resize the original upload when it is received, but this also seems to work OK.
First ShoZu end to end test completed
Well, after a good (and eventful) holiday, I finally had a bit of spare time to work on my ShoZu Drupal plug-in. The result is a successful end 2 end test from a ShoZu enabled mobile device to my Drupal blog of an image taken on my N73, currently this includes Title and Description. When I get a bit more time I'd like to add taxonomy words( ShoZu tags) as well.
The first upload test can be found here, more to follow as I work on the plug-in.
First XML-RPC blog test
So I have started looking into uploading blog content via XML-RPC. This is being done with a custom module with my own functions for authorisation and upload. The upload is currently a combination of blog.newPost and metaweblog.newMediaObject as I need to ensure an image is uploaded to every blog entry (see the test blog here).
