FlickIt’s history, and its future
When we first built FlickIt we did it to scratch a personal itch. How could we quickly post photos that we had already uploaded to Flickr onto our personal Web sites?
FlickIt started out as a hack for WordPress. Using WordPress’ plugin architecture, we were able to have a pop-up within the WordPress administration area to access your Flickr photos, and paste the HTML you needed directly into your content box.
The interface was fairly simple and the logo was atrocious, yet it still served its purpose going through a few versions as a WordPress hack. FlickIt was then released for free due to the terms of service that Flickr had initiated with its API.
On April 29th, 2005 Apple Computer shipped Mac OS X “Tiger”. Tiger shipped with a new feature called Dashboard, similar to other applications like Konfabulator; Dashboard allowed people to install small widgets to be used for things like checking the weather, stocks, a calculator, and so on. About one week later we released FlickIt 2 as a Dashboard widget, being rewritten from the ground up, and it spread quickly.
FlickIt 2.1 was released almost eight months later, and is now the last version number FlickIt may ever see. We had a great time working on FlickIt, and wished that we had more time to refine, rebuild, and release newer versions. However, we’ve decided to release the source code for FlickIt and allow anyone that would like to take the code and either use it for one of their own projects, or continue building FlickIt for themselves. Perhaps to scratch their own itch.