Oystercatcher Spotting 2.0
Since 2005, the University of Bergen has made a webcam of roof-breeding oystercatchers (tjeld, in Norwegian) available for everyone to enjoy. And for some reason, the site is quite popular among students and others during the breeding period in May. To make this activity a bit more practical, at least for me, I decided to turn to why's Shoes, the nicest/smallest GUI library known to man. Thus I created a small GUI app that fetches the latest images from the webcam and display them at 240x180 instead of the original 800x600. Together with "always on top", this turned out to work quite well. What can possibly be better than watching birds while working?
If you want to attempt to install this thingy, install Shoes from http://shoooes.net/, then download http://chrononaut.net/tjeld-app.shy. Run Shoes, click "Open an App" and select the .shy file you just downloaded. It has been reported to be rather dodgy in Windows (d'oh), it works fine in Linux and OS X though. The source is made available here. It weights in at about 20 lines of code (discarding the comments etc). Not bad for a fully functional webcam frontend.