A lot of people are trying to send handwritten messages with Seenly. Yeah, that’s not very handy: we made Seenly mirror everything because people are used to looking in a mirror.

A new feature, the “flip”-button, remedies this problem. Now, if you take a snap, you can flip it to make your message readable again.

We also improved the interface of the snap. We divided it in tabs to get rid of the clutter, and added a “Share through e-mail” and a “Code” section. The e-mail section is pretty straightforward: enter your name and address, the address of a friend, an optional message and poof, your snap is sent through e-mail.

The code section has shortcuts to HTML-code (for MySpace or blogs, for example), and Forum-code for easy pasting of your snaps.

Wow. Seenly is off to an amazing start. On the first day of being public, we got 9000 pageviews, 3000 unique visitors, each with an average time on site of 7 minutes, and about 1000 snaps shot. Our server pushed 910MB through the tubes and didn’t break a sweat. Good thing we got that boa-setup running, since it served 35000 hotlinked snap-views.

We got some great press as well. Downloadsquad was the first, and since they’re a part of Weblogs it sent a ripple through the blogosphere. Mashable quickly followed suit and also spawned a lot of duplicates in its wake, including on the French Mashable. Flickr got its first two Seenly pics and we’re even mentioned on many non-English blogs.

Just recently Lifehacker joined in on the game and proposed to use Seenly as a security camera.

Meanwhile, we’re working on releasing a couple of new features in the near future. Stay tuned!

Seenly is now fully open for anyone to use and enjoy. Just go there and click to take a snap. No need to sign-up or get invites.

Have fun!

That’s right: we, too, joined the Facebook craze.

Seenly now offers Seenly Snaps on Facebook. Users can take snaps from their webcam straight to Facebook and post them on their profile, or send them to friends. Friends can view the snaps or take a snap which is then also shown on the profile of the user

We made Seenly Snaps as open as possible. We don’t believe in forcing people to add Seenly Snaps just to view snaps sent to them, or to put one on a user’s profile. It would artificially inflate our total user count and leave a foul aftertaste with people using Seenly Snaps. It would probably even make users refrain from sending their friends any snaps.

No, we’d rather people added Seenly Snaps because it’s fun and easy to use. So find a friend who’s using Seenly, or go here to be the first of your peers who can send snaps straight from a webcam to your friends on Facebook.

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.

To system administrators the title of this post will look familiar. It tells you how much load your server is facing. Yes, that’s right: Seenly is now hosted on its very own dedicated server. As you can see, the load is zero, so there’s not much going on yet.

If any of these numbers go north of 2 (for 2 CPU-cores), we’re in trouble. It would mean the server needs to process more than it can handle. Most likely though, the hard-drive, network-connection or RAM will become a bottleneck far before the CPU’s ever get overloaded. Raw CPU power is overrated for mere webservers.

We configured the server to be very robust and light. We’re using Apache 2 and PHP5.2 for dynamic pages, and Boa for any static content. Boa is a very fast, very lightweight HTTP-server, bound primarily by hard-drive speed. Using Boa to serve static content means the server doesn’t need to start a very expensive (in terms of RAM and CPU) and relatively slow Apache+PHP process. It just throws out the requested bytes through the kernel. This way we can serve thousands of the snaps you took in mere seconds. Much more than we could if we hosted those using Apache as well.

Oh, and about the load average of zero? That might just change soon… Can you guess what’s coming?

Finally, the much anticipated “delete”-button has arrived. Apparently a lot of people have taken some photos they absolutely want to get rid of. Judging from some of the embarrassing photos in my own personal gallery, I understand them completely. You can find it underneath each photo in your gallery.

Delete is the first Ajax-feature in Seenly, but certainly not the last. We’re using jQuery as our Ajax-library. It’s one of the smallest out there (20KB!) and has a no-conflict mode to play nicely with other Ajax-libraries, which we’ll be needing in the future (hint!).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some quite embarrassing snaps to delete.

Oh for the love of all that is good and holy, please.

Told ya it was going to be an exciting summer: 9 juicy effects are added to Seenly to spice-up your snapshots. Chili peppers have nothing on us.

We’ve got the classic flavors like Black & White, and Sepia. We’ve got the more exotic X-Ray and Mirror as made famous by Photobooth. We’ve got some home-made effects, like Artsy Fartsy (vignetting with washed colors) and Lomo 9 (modeled after Lomography’s Pop 9 photocamera).

There’s also a short countdown from three when you press the shutter. Snap hands-free, and get those flippers in your pics to give them some much-deserved attention. There’s a nice flash-effect when the shutter actually triggers, to give you some feedback on when to look extra good.

Give it a spin, and don’t be scared to shout when something’s wrong!

Point Three is near.

A couple of minutes ago I pushed version 0.2 of Seenly to the server. Go on, check it out, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. These are the biggest changes:

• Non-destructive Save: Pressing “Save it” won’t discard the unsaved other photos. Simply press “Back to the Webcam” and you’ll be able to continue where you left off.
• Remember Me, everywhere: “Remember Me” now works for multiple locations. Logging in at work won’t make Seenly forget you were already logged in at home.
• My Photos: You can view all the photos you previously took using the “My Photos” link when you’re logged in.
• Smoother Interface: Seenly will display an error message if there is no webcam found, or if you didn’t authorize access to the webcam. You won’t have to guess what’s wrong anymore.

I hope you’ll enjoy this new release. It was way overdue due to my finals, for which I apologize. You can expect more updates during the summer. It’s going to be an exciting season.

(This post is a bit technical-flavoured: tread cautiously)

In the process of adding humane error-messages to Seenly, I stumbled upon a design-mistake in Flash itself regarding webcams. Like most of you know, you have to authorize a webpage to access your webcam, and you can “remember” this choice in the Flash Privacy Settings.

The problem happens when you don’t authorize the webpage to use your webcam. Upon asking Flash for access to the webcam, Seenly receives a value “false”, signifying something went wrong, or “true”, meaning everything is going good. When receiving false, Seenly searches for the problem by checking if it got authorization or not. There’s a variable (Camera.muted) that is set to True if we did not get authorization. This might happen because of two reasons:

A) Flash doesn’t know yet if you would like to allow or deny access to the webcam, and is showing you a dialog allowing you to choose.

B) You already chose to deny access to the webcam in the past, and made Flash remember it.

In situation A, an event is triggered when you choose either of the two (Allow or Deny, it’s easy), and Seenly then acts accordingly. In situation B, nothing happens. Seenly has no way of knowing if the dialog-box requesting authorization pops up or doesn’t. This means we need to tell you we didn’t get access to the camera even though you might not even have been given a choice yet. This is what that looks like:

(Six is the name of the dev-server, used to test new versions of Seenly. Yes, it’s in reference to the character in Syrup by Max Barry)

It’s as if something went wrong even before you did anything. The other option is to not show anything, but that’s even worse because then the user has no way of knowing what it did do wrong (namely, made Flash remember to deny access to the webcam). This is the option chosen by Youtube (go on, test it). Both options are confusing, and none are user-friendly.

So Flash developers - Please give us some way of knowing if the user opted to remember to deny access! A lot of confused users will be very grateful. Triggering the Camera.Muted event when this is the case would be good, thanks.