[Commons-l] Commons browser

Magnus Manske magnus.manske at web.de
Thu Jun 15 22:15:51 UTC 2006


As a personal excercise in a programming language rather new to me, C#,
I have started a commons category browser. It uses WikiSense to generate
a commons category tree on-the-fly, and downloads the images in a
selected category to be displayed as thumbnails.

Noteworthy points:
* Tries to download existing image thumbnails first to increase
speed/save bandwidth
* Caches the thumbnail locally
* Doubleclick opens the browser with the image description page

Note that not much else is working right now; it's just what I hacked
together in an afternoon, in a programming language I'm still exploring.
Scrolling through thumbnails doesn't work yet, some images are ignored,
UTF8 category names are broken, etc.

Plans:
* Fix bugs
* Cache category tree locally
* Load thumbnails in the background, so one can browse in the meantime
* Analyze description pages in the background to mark images with
troublesome templates

For those not faint of heart, with a fast internet connection and .NET
2.0 installed (Window$ only, though AFAIK the current Mono should
theoretically support it):

http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/CommonsBrowser.zip

For the rest of you, here's a screenshot:

http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/Screenshot.png

Just the executable, source will be released under GPL, in anyone is
interested that is ;-)

Magnus



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