Configurable FreeSpin

A few months ago, Ketan Anjaria (aka KidBombay) made a cool spin viewer for things in freebase. One of my projects at Applied Minds is going to be springboarding off of that code, so I started off by changing the code to make the client configurable. We’re contributing our changes back to the code base, and Metaweb is going to release the FreeSpin code as Open Source soon at which point folks can play with the code themselves, but in the meantime anyone can create their own viewer for their favorite freebase types by grabbing the swf file and creating an xml file to drive the viewer.

I have an example of the VentureSpin client, which is controlled by an XML file in the same directory. Similarly, there is a FilmSpin client, controlled by its own XML file.

To make this all work for you, all you need to do is grab one of the FreeSpin.swf files and put it on your own web server, and create a freeSpin.xml file (I know, the capitalization is a pain, I promise to fix that soon) in the same directory, and it should work like a charm.

If you do use it, let the folks at Metaweb know where your viewer is so they can see how people are browsing their data.