Yahoo

In an attempt to beef up its ad-search business by opening up its search technology, Yahoo has launched a new program called BOSS (Build your Own Search Service). The move is part of the new "Yahoo Open Strategy", a strategy that aims to attract more users and developers to Yahoo's technology and services by opening them up. It's not a totally free lunch, of course, as traffic over a certain "query threshold" will require some type of agreement with Yahoo, either hosted ads, revenue, or some type of exclusivity agreement.

With this first release of BOSS developers can fetch search content for Web, News, Image, and Spelling Suggestions. The API itself is a RESTful web service, with the option to receive data back from the service in JSON or XML formats. Full documentation on the search API is here.

If you are working on a project you probably want to have a quick mock-up so the business can easily understand how a web application will look. Well, Yahoo! has just made it easier to do so with their new Design Stencil Kit.

Stencils kits are available for OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), Adobe Illustrator (PDF and SVG), and Adobe Photoshop (PNG) and cover the following topics:

• Ad Units
• Calendars
• Carousels
• Charts and Tables
• UI Controls
• Form Elements
• Grids
• Menus and Buttons
• Mobile - General
• Mobile - iPhone
• Navigation and Pagination
• OS Elements
• Placeholder Text
• Screen Resolutions
• Tabs
• Windows and Containers

To use a design stencil, download the stencil kit compatible with your design application, launch your design application, and start adding stencil objects to your projects. Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle, and Visio users can ungroup stencil objects to customize and manipulate size, layout, and aesthetics.

You can read more about the stencil kit here.

You can go directly to the stencil kits here.

So, get the Design Stencil Kit and show the business what you are working on. Or even better, get your favorite Business Analyst to do it for you.

Dynamic Drive has posted a new color picker widget built with the YUI JavaScript toolkit. This widget can be integrated in a form field to provide an inline or floating color picker. A control can also be assigned the color picker, activated with a click, with an option to set the control's background color based on the value chosen in the color picker widget. Since each color picker is defined as an empty DIV on the page, you can surround it with content and style it as you like. This new implementation also supports multiple instances of the color picker on the same page. So, two form elements can have two separate color pickers, as opposed to having one picker shared by all elements.

Visit Dynamic Drive for the script, demos, and installation instructions.

Announced today at the Yahoo! Developer Network, YSlow 0.9.5 beta 1 has been released to address issues with Firefox and Firebug Compatibility.

In this release, you'll find:

• Firefox 3 beta 5 support
• Support for the latest versions of the different Firebug branches
• Pie chart representation of the components in the Stats tab
• Improved display in the expanded CSS expressions rule report in the Performance tab
• Support for disabled Firebug Net Panel (default behavior in Firebug 1.2)
• Misc fixes for the reports in the Tools section

You can download the tool here, report bugs here, read the performance rules, and participate in the performance mailing list discussions.

Read the full announcement

If you haven't heard of it before and are wondering what it does, YSlow analyzes web page performance and tells you why performance is slow. It's integrated into Firefox as a plug-in for Firebug. You can learn more about YSlow by reading the user guide.

If you are a developer using the Yahoo! User Interfaces then you are always looking for good resources for learning more about coding with the library. You've probably already gone through a lot of the information on the Yahoo! Developer pages and perhaps you would like a good book about the library. Well, I have come across a book called Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library.

Below is what you will learn from the book

• Explore the YUI Library—utilities, controls, core files, and CSS tools
• Install the library and get up and running with it
• Handle DOM manipulation and scripting
• Get inside Event Handling with YUI
• Create consistent web pages using YUI CSS tools
• Work with Containers—implementation, skinning, adding transitions, and tabs
• Debug, maintain, and update applications with the Logger control
• Examples included in the book:

•     Calendar interface
•     Autocomplete
•     Creating panels
•     Dialogs
•     Custom tooltips
•     Forms
•     Split button
•     TreeView Control
•     Browser History Manager with Calendar
•     Simple animation
•     Custom animation
•     Creating tabs and adding content dynamically
•     Dragging and dropping
•     Implementing sliders
•     Logger at work
•     Logging custom classes

The book retails for $44.99 and below is the information that you would need to pick it up at your local book store.

Language: English
Paperback: 380 pages [191mm x 235mm]
Release date: March 2008
ISBN: 1847192327
ISBN: 13 978-1-847192-32-5
Author(s): Dan Wellman
Topics and Technologies: Open Source, AJAX

You can read more about the book and purchase it here.

It is good to see more resources for great libraries like the YUI. If you have a chance to read the book, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it (you can leave a comment or blog about it on this blog using your free Ajaxonomy account).

You may have used our del.icio.us Spy application and hopefully it has been useful in finding new websites and bookmarks. If you have a blog or website you may have thought that it would be cool to have a widget of what is on the del.icio.us Spy. Well, we have just released a del.icio.us Spy widget for your blog or website.

Amidst all the news swirling around about a hostile Yahoo! takeover, and the battle of the titans (Microsoft & Google), Yahoo! has released a new service - Yahoo! Live - a personal live streaming video service. [read more about Yahoo! Live at their blog]

Yahoo released an API [a set of Web Services and a couple of embeddable Flash objects] along with this new service. With this API, you can:

• Find out who's broadcasting right now
• Get data about past broadcasts
• See snapshots of past broadcasts
• Embed live video in your blog or web page

Do keep in mind that the service is currently in limited beta and is not always available.
You may get a message stating "Whoa! Yahoo! Live is an experimental release - we can tell you like the experiment! We're tuning now. Refresh, wait a few seconds, or click here to try again."

Read more about the Yahoo! Live API at the Yahoo! Developer Network and be sure to check out the Yahoo! Live Randomizer demo using REST/JavaScript.

In designing a web page most of us know that it is better to stay away from using tables in our design and instead use full CSS. This is great in theory, but in practice it can be quite a bit more complicated.

Well, Yahoo! has felt our pain and has built a visual tool to make page layout much easier. The tool is the Yahoo! User Interface CSS Grid Builder.

The tool is very easy to use, you simply click the various option to create the page layout that you would like. Once you have the page how you would like it, you simply click on the "Show Code" button and then copy and paste the code. Now you can start scripting and adding content to your page.

If you aren't already using this tool you should at least check it out (click here to go to the application).

I'm sure that you have already heard about the possibility of Microsoft buying Yahoo!. I'm not going to go in to much detail about deal, as I'm sure that you've already had your fill of that. Instead, I want to take a brief look into how this may affect Yahoo! in the future.

If Microsoft does in fact buy Yahoo!, it is very possible that all new development will be using Microsoft technologies instead of the current technologies. When I heard of this deal, the first thing I thought was that all the future development will be done in .NET technologies and run on Windows servers (can you say "nightly reboot"?).

From a web developers perspective, I really like the work that Yahoo! has done with the Yahoo! User Interface toolkit, but if Microsoft buys Yahoo!, will development stop as Microsoft tries to push Silverlight? Not to mention the possibility of abandoning JSON as Microsoft seems to prefer XML for Ajax applications.

I personally look at this with the worry that Yahoo! will stop being an innovator, as Microsoft looks to compete with Google and push their own technologies.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, you can leave a comment or write a blog post with your free account on this site (once you login click on "Create content" => "Blog entry").

Yahoo! has just announced that it would begin supporting OpenID 2.0 technology for both yahoo.com and flikr.com by the end of the month.

Yahoo!’s initial OpenID service, which will be available in public beta on January 30, enables a seamless and transparent web experience by allowing users to use their custom OpenID identifier on me.yahoo.com or to simply type in “www.yahoo.com” or “www.flickr.com” on any site that supports OpenID 2.0.

Full Press Release

With the addition of 248 million Yahoo! users, the OpenID user community essentially triples in size (going from an estimated 120 million users to 368 million).

More information regarding Yahoo!'s OpenID support can be found here.