By now everybody who knows what Facebook is, knows they announced an open platform for integrating with it. Interestingly enough Microsoft was a launch partner of theirs so there is also a shared source .NET API layer available. We decided to jump on the opportunity and published SoapBox for Facebook. Chris mentioned this in his announcement blog earlier.

But, as with anything that goes to production, adding cool features quickly turned into fixing uncool bugs, scope discussions, planning sessions, and then it became work.

I had a bit of a realization yesterday. I hadn't written code for the sheer fun of it in a really long time. Don't get me wrong, I love the stuff I do (almost) every day. We're coding cutting edge stuff here and it's a blast. But, I wanted to do something for me! So I wrote a screensaver.

Strange, huh? The guy that writes blogs on memory management, async programming, and other maddening things decided to hack together a screensaver. You'll just have to get over the shock of it all... Research was done, scope was decided, fingers flew. A few hours later, I had a screensaver! At 2am I decided on its name (probably a bad idea), Friend Photosaver for Facebook, whipped up an installer and submitted the app to Facebook. Catchy isn't it? Yeeeah. Anyway, though the name stinks, I think it's a pretty cool screensaver.

It aggregates the list of all your photos with all of the photos of your friends, and picks them at random. It then stuffs the photo in a random spot on the screen where it will be visible. Right now it only displays on the primary screen. Secondary screens are blank. Here's a little preview:

If you're a Facebook user you can login and install my screensaver. The rest of you... well, this is pretty useless. But you should be on Facebook too. Oh, and (shameless plug), don't forget to use SoapBox for Facebook. :)