Introducing the DisplayShelf widget

This afternoon, at CodeMash, James Ward and I took over an open spaces table, got some extra displays set up and hacked up a TurboGears widget wrapper for Ely Greenfield’s Display Shelf Flex component. The Display Shelf gives you the effect that Apple created in iTunes 7 with the cover art view. Now, in TurboGears, you can display your own photos the same way trivially. Just call the widget with a Python list of image URLs, and you’ve got your shelf!

This was completely unrehearsed live coding, and it went surprisingly well. The widget itself is far simpler than Ely’s Flex component, so Ely really deserves the credit for how cool a widget this is. This was a good chance for me to learn a bit more about Flex and the Flex Ajax Bridge. James got to learn about making TurboGears widgets. Some screencasts might come out of what we did there, and I’ll link to them if they pop up.

In the meantime, you can easy_install DisplayShelf to get the widget, or go to the DisplayShelf Cheeseshop page to get the source.