On Tuesday, the YUI (Yahoo! User Interface) team celebrated their second anniversary of making life easier for front-end developers. The YUI is a set of JavaScript utilities and controls, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.
There were not quite simultaneous parties in London--in a dark West End pub, and in Sunnyvale--at Yahoo's HQ. YUI has fostered a dedicated, generous community of developers helping each other out and contributing knowledge and code to the project. The Sunnyvale party celebrated some of the heroes of this far-flung community. You'll find ample coverage on the YUI blog (thanks Eric!) and more good stuff on the Y! Developer Network blog.
Christian Heilmann is a Yahoo technology evangelist based in the U.K -- Christian started warming up for the festivities a week earlier, with a talk he delivered at GeekUp Leeds, a grassroots gathering of web developers in the north west of England. Christian's presentation takes a head-on approach to YUI's terrible twos with a compelling answer to the question, "Why the YUI?" (or furthermore, "why any library"). Watch for yourself:
You can follow along with the presentation, Y the YUI? over at slideshare.net.
Big thanks to Dominic Hodgson, and the folks from NorthCast, who documented Christian's presentation at Geekup Leeds, at the Old Broadcasting House, and gave us permission to distribute their video by embedding it here.
If you just want to see some party photos of 60 or 70 happy developers drinking beers in London ("in a dark and dingy pub so the lighting is rather moody"), here's a set for you:
YUI Library and YPattern Library Turn 2!
Some stunning photos of happy developers, this time from Sunnyvale, thanks to Dustin Diaz, who has generously let us use some of them in the "Who We Are" slideshow above on the right rail:
YUI 2nd Birthday
Popularity: 29% [?]
havi hoffman, February 28th, 2008 on 8:30 am
“How much kindness is there in the world?” I asked myself one morning as I showered (my best inner-monologues take place in the shower). “Can it be measured? Does it change hour by hour? Season to season? City to city?”
“Every day,” I thought, while shampooing, “people send one another IMs, text messages, emails, comment on each other’s MySpace profiles, and write on each other’s Facebook walls, leaving affirmations of friendship, love, and support. It’s disorganized now, but let’s try to channel, visualize, and measure it.”
The Apps Studio team agreed that this was a pretty cool idea, and thus was born Vibes (an application initially for Facebook). We describe Vibes as a social experiment tracking the flow of kindness across the world. Have a friend with the flu? A brother or sister with a big job interview tomorrow? Or do you just want to let someone know you're thinking of them? Send them some good vibes, and watch in real time as people across the world share their kindness.
The Apps Studio is a small, new tiger team committed to building best-in-class social applications for Yahoo!, sometimes extending existing Yahoo! services and sometimes creating entirely new ones (like Vibes). When my mom used to cook, her guiding principal was “everything’s better with cheese.” When the Apps Studio cooks up new apps, our guiding principal is “everything’s better with friends.”
We are very excited by the recent advances in social application platforms and the types of new online experiences they allow. Our goal is to bring your favorite Yahoo! products to you and your friends, wherever you all may be.
So, we hope you’ll check out Vibes and send a few to your friends. Stay tuned for more from our team.
P.S. At the time of this writing L.A. and S.F. seem to be the kindest cities. East Coast, consider that a challenge.
Scuba diving aftermath photo by Delgoff.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Matt Kozlov, February 22nd, 2008 on 12:15 pm
Editor's note: MyBlogLog API - Q & A with guest blogger Jon Henshaw
Editor's note: Introducing Jon Henshaw, Internet Strategist at Sitening, a Nashville-based Web development and search marketing company, makers of the Raven SEO Tool Set. He's responsible for driving exposure and traffic to his clients' websites via social networks and search engines. He first discovered MyBlogLog last year and has been using it on every blog he manages ever since.
Last month, as soon as he heard about it, Jon signed up for the MyBlogLog API beta. A week ago, we got a tip about this cool WordPress plugin built by the team at Sitening. Please keep in mind that for now these plugins only work if you've got a Yahoo! API key that's been permissioned for the MyBlogLog API beta. If you're interested in trying it out, please apply to the beta at developer.yahoo.com/mybloglog or hang in there just a little longer. The API will be available to everyone in March.
Q: Out of all of the social media APIs that are available, why did you choose to work with the MyBlogLog API?
A: I've always had an affinity for MyBlogLog, because it solves two difficult marketing problems – getting exposure and networking within your niche. Since MyBlogLog already does a good job addressing both of those problems, I was excited when I heard they were coming out with an API and I immediately started thinking about ways we could extend their service.
Q: Is the WordPress plugin the first thing you made with the MyBlogLog API?
A: No, initially we used their API to build some custom pages for our blog. We wanted to implement the API to give us a way to promote and thank our Raven MyBlogLog members. During the process, we wrote our own PHP Wrapper for the MyBlogLog API and turned it into an open source project. The wrapper makes it much easier for PHP developers to quickly build Web applications with the MyBlogLog API. Then we decided to take it further and used our wrapper to create the WordPress plugin.
Q: How does the MyBlogLog WordPress plugin extend or benefit your blog?
A: We believe that Raven's community is essential to the success of our blog. So we used the MyBlogLog WordPress plugin to celebrate and thank the readers and customers who contribute most to the conversation. Our plugin displays a widget with the most active MyBlogLog members, creates a members' list page, and also creates a detailed member profile page. The profile page was especially fun to make, because we took several of the social networks that members belonged to – all stored in their MyBlogLog profile – and retrieved and displayed their recent posts and social bookmarks on it. We also listed their blogs and other related information. So far, the response from our members has been very positive.
Popularity: 30% [?]
Jon Henshaw, February 14th, 2008 on 11:00 pm
We’re excited to share with you Yahoo! Live, a new experiment in live video from the Advanced Products team at Yahoo!. Y! Live was dreamed up as a way to make it possible for anyone to create their own live video experience. Broadcast the concert you’re at. Webcast your own live DJ set. Lifecast. Build your own live video speed dating application. We’ve created a website and an API that lets you do all these things and many more.
On Y! Live, you can use your webcam to broadcast your own live video channel. Or just tune in to other people’s channels. The video and audio are in real time, and as you watch someone’s channel or broadcast your own, you can interact chat-room style with other viewers.
There are limitless channels and anyone can be a star. Even if you don’t want to broadcast your own channel, you can still activate your webcam to broadcast while you’re viewing someone else’s channel.
If you're a developer, check out the developer preview of our API and embeddable components, as well as a sample app and quick tutorial.
We’re looking for your feedback, and we'll be incorporating it as we get to version 1.0 of our API in the coming months. Let us know what you think. We’re always interested in seeing what you’ve built, and we’ll feature cool stuff you build on our site.
Who built it
How do I get it
Keep in mind that Y! Live is an experimental release. The Advanced Products team is a small incubation team at Yahoo! – Y! Live is currently a limited capacity release, so bear with us as and we may reach our limits in periods of high traffic. Our top priority now is to hear your feedback – send your comments to ylive@yahoogroups.com, and follow our twitter feed to hear about headline broadcasts and notable things happening live.
For more information on getting started, Click here.
Popularity: 36% [?]
Recently, we've been hosting the NASA CoLab Luna Philosophie talk series at Brickhouse in San Francisco. It's a public conversation between NASA thought leaders and top scientists and the community: "Anyone who is interested in an open, creative dialogue on human, space related topics is encouraged to attend!"
The second NASA CoLab@Brickhouse session took place earlier this month. Tom Cochrane of NASA Ames discussed his most recent project, Virtual Reality System Engineering Environments for the Space Program. He reflected on his lengthy career -- 25 years of using ever more powerful technology to engineer complex simulation models ranging from ground water movement to space flight.
Building on the tradition of SimCity and SimEarth, Tom and his team at NASA Ames have built SimStation, SpaceStation:SIM, and SimCEV. These are virtual environments for browsing and understanding real human space flight systems environments. The team is currently developing SimConstellation, a viewer that will support NASA's plans to return to the moon.
Unlike Sim games from Maxis, NASA simulations are mission critical: if the engineers get it wrong, the astronauts don’t come back. The simulations monitor oxygen levels, rocket fuel, and a range of other factors to accurately replicate what’s supposed to happen. You can drill into each phase of the mission and rotate the views to see exactly what’s going on inside the craft.
This degree of complexity is extraordinary. For instance, in order to land on a particular spot on the moon, the spacecraft has to orbit the moon in a particular orbit. To achieve that orbit, it must get onto a precise space trajectory out of earth’s atmosphere, and for that the craft must launch from a particular spot, at a particular speed. And that’s just for modeling orientation...
One memorable quote from Tom: “I remember being a brat on the Apollo program – they did all their documentation using typewriters and carbon paper.”
Decades later, Tom and his team have built an entire environment that generates simulations. An environment that's light-years beyond what you could visualize with a typewriter.
Thanks to Ricky Montalvo for his high-quality video of the talk. Watch it here:
Video by Ricky Montalvo, Yahoo! Developer Network, Total runtime 59min:33sec
Popularity: 9% [?]
Salim Ismail, January 30th, 2008 on 7:45 am
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