Conclusion

This was my second attempt in order to create a working mash-up. I’m very pleased with the results as the application is doing exactly how I imagined it to. The idea of weaving different user’s accounts at one place and having to control between those accounts was achievable using Quartz Composer. Having to learn the program just for mash-up within a limited period of time, Quartz composer was fairly easy and gave many options to make things work.

The application requires feed addresses of the people one wishes to follow. The followers can be totally strangers or groups of interest, like I’m following two groups of interest for my application. I’m following Android and MAC Make-up posts on Twitter and images from Flickr. It was a co-incident I found both on Twitter and Flickr. As far as I’m aware same people do not run the accounts however I’m getting out what I wanted. MAC make-up images as background and post related to MAC as a layer appearing on a higher level.
Current Application allows eight RSS feeds to be used a one time, four of Twitter and four of Flickr. Input parameters allows user to feed different URL RSS feed addresses inside Quartz Composer. The application can only run on Mac machines, as Quartz Composer is not supported on Windows.

The application has gone through a few design stages as shown in my earlier posts on blogger. The blog consists of images along side with videos. The videos demonstrate my working throughout the project, starting from learning Quartz Composer to creating my mash-up.

Problems
I did have problems with twitter feeds as they take up to half an hour to get up-dated when used by another software. The other problem I had with twitter feeds was that I couldn’t use the direct feed address into Quartz Composer. One RSS feed would work on it own but when combined with Flickr feed or any other Twitter feed, it would break down. I used Yahoo Pipes to overcome this problem. For my own accounts I’m using Twitter user number and for Twitter Android and MAC make-up I’m using their Usernames to get RSS feed. There is no special reason why I’m using two different ways to get results its simply because I was testing a number of things while creating this mash-up.

API
I needed to request an API key for Flickr in order to follow others and my own feeds in Quartz Composer. The process was simple and all the instructions were on Flickr’s website.