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If you’re trying to look back to see which photos on Flickr other members have commented on or favorited, you’ll quickly notice that the drop-down menu for Recent activity on your photos only allows you to search for activity up to one month prior. At first glance, it seems that if you want to look back across the past year, you’re out of luck.

It’s pretty easy to get around this problem, though. If you notice the URL bar on your browser while you’re on the recent activity page, you’ll see that it reads something like ‘http://flickr.com/recent_activity.gne?days=30′ Ok, so it seems that there’s a variable there named ‘days,’ which implies that the drop-down is setting the number of days worth of activity to display. Now, although there’s no drop-down option that shows more than 30 days, entering any number after the = sign seems to work just fine. I tried it successfully up to 1000 days, or approximately 3 years. If you’ve got a lot of comments, of course, this search could be pretty slow, so be patient with it.

flickr, months, photostream, recent activity, recent activity on your photos, recent activity over 30 days, year

First off, Thumbstacks.com, the new web-based Flash/AJAX presentation software I blogged about recently, is definitely still in the alpha testing phase, and the current lack of features is to be expected in these early stages of deployment. However, I’ve now played around with the software, and there seem to be some distinct pros and cons that I can see so far:
Pros

1. Right-click menus make it easy to insert images from flickr or your computer. Alternatively, right-clicking along the list of slides offers nice standard options for creating new slides, deleting old ones, etc…
2. Pre-made templates offer an instant way to make your presentation look nice, as well as to keep a consistent format throughout.
3. Real-time text editing and image manipulation responded well when tested, with little to no lag, and newly imported images loaded quickly.

Cons

1. Image manipulation lacks several important features, such as the ability to maintain proportion of the image when resizing it (Shift doesn’t work).
2. The templates collection is quite limited, and there is little to no info encouraging others to create and submit templates. Perhaps those in charge plan to add this in in the future.
3. As far as I could tell, there are no options to choose a ’style’ for an individual slide. PowerPoint offers users several different arrangements for the slides, such as text/image side-by-side, all text, and various other combinations. Such flexibility, combined with the existing templates in Thumbstacks, would really make the program sing.

In spite of its current limitations, Thumbstacks definitely shows promise, not least of all because its native format supports collaboration and sharing of work with multiple users, thereby overcoming the main weak point of PowerPoint. Soon it should be possible to demonstrate a product to a client over the web, or hold a meeting with representatives from several different firms, without worrying about whether or not sufficient PowerPoint licenses are in existence to support such an endeavour, or if application compatibility will become an issue. The combination of Flash with an AJAX backup ensures that a majority of visitors will have no issues viewing others’ presentations. All in all, Thumbstacks is showing definite progress. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it gets bought up by Google before too long, perhaps as a nice addition to the newfangled Google Account.