The Vision
Like many Daylife fans, we regularly find ours immersed in the interesting and endlessly connected news topics and photos. In the back of our mind, there's always this perfect Daylife image-centric news browser waiting to be built. Like many things in life, we thought about it, talked about it, never did anything about it.

The Contest
We heard about the DayPI contest on 7/15 while chatting with the Daylife team in New York. Later that day, we brought back the idea of the perfect news browser - if we built it, it would surely be worthy of the contest. Can we build it in a few days? Nah.. we thought it was too late in the game, and we couldn't possibly build something good enough in such short amount of time to be competitive.

To build or not to build
A few days past, the urge of building the news browser was too great to resist - we knew that combining our vision of the viewer with the new web application model we are working on at Zoomino, we would be able to build something remarkable. So on Friday night 7/18, one week before the deadline, we decided to go for it! The next morning, David and I sat down for 4 hours to brainstorm what this browser would look like. We knew we wanted a kick-ass visualizer that would take the rich content of Daylife and make it easy to fly through. We looked at various existing image viewers, sketched out the basic design and workflow.

The Global Team Effort
When our design sketches reached our dev team in China, 1/2 way around the globe, it was already Monday 7/21, only 4 days left. Our developers studied the feasibility of design. With the DayPI documentation site and a few hints from Vineet of Daylife, we got comfortable with the API, and development started right away. On Tuesday 7/22, only 1 day later, Tiger, our Flash guru and Basil our web technology expert had the prototype built. That night, with David in Memphis, the dev team in China, and myself in New York, the global team discussed about the prototype, and set directions for the improvements to be made in the next few days. Two more one-day agile development cycles later, we have the viewer we wanted, and best of all, it's riding on the Zoomino platform, giving it wings to fly to ANY web page.

The End Product - "Take Daylife with You"
From idea inception to a posh Daylife application that can run on ANY web page, it took us less than a week to conclude the effort. We call this application "Take Daylife with You" because using this application, a user can take the wealth of Daylife news content to any web page to explore concepts he/she deems news worthy. The speed at which we got this done is of course a great testament the Zoomino team's passion and ability, but it's also proof of the power of the DayPI.

The Recipe
1. We used the following API to get relevant news objects for a concept that interests the user.
* search_getRelatedArticles
* search_getRelatedImages
* search_getRelatedTopics

2. When a user selects a topic, we use the following API to populate a Flash viewer of the images related to the topic:
* topic_getRelatedImages
* topic_getRelatedTopics
* topic_getRelatedArticles

Well, that's it. The calls are simple to use, but ultra powerful, esp. when they are used in the right interface for the right context!

Sincerely Yours,

Zoomino.com Team