Vimagi: The Facebook App

I finally finished the Vimagi Facebook app! Check out the screen shots:





The app works similar to the vimagi.com website: you can create paintings with titles, tags, and descriptions and share them with anyone. Other Facebook users can comment on the paintings and rate them. Paintings created in Facebook are automatically posted to vimagi.com, where vimagi.com users can also add comments and ratings. All paintings have embed codes you can use to embed them on any site (with playback). In Facebook, you can create paintings for your Facebook friends and those paintings will appear on their (and your) profile. Similar to vimagi.com, the Facebook app has a gallery and a tags page, which contains content from both vimagi.com and the Facebook app.

I created the Facebook app mostly as a learning exercise, but I also believe that the Vimagi features would appeal to more people by being embedded into people's their existing social network rather than in a standalone site.

Unfortunately, I underestimated how tricky it would be to port the vimagi.com features and code into Facebook without breaking the site and while seamlessly blending the paintings and data created on Facebook and on vimagi.com. (One of the pesky issues I encountered is that Facebook applications have root URLs of the form http://apps.facebook.com/[app name], which was incompatible with the vimagi.com relative URLs. The existing URLs all start with a forward slash, assuming they follow immediately after the domain name. My life would have been much better if Facebook used the url scheme "http://[app name].apps.facebook.com/" for Facebook apps as it would have allowed existing URLs to remain unmodified.)

If you like to paint, I hope you enjoy the applications, and if you have friends who like to paint, please send them an invitation. Facebook needs some more Erlang-generated pageviews :)

If you like Vimagi and you're on Facebook, please join the Vimagi fan club. Also, I'll appreciate it if you let me know of any feedback or suggestions you may have.

P.S. Thanks I to Bryan Fink for the excellent erlang2facebook library.