I need to go pick up a hard drive after work today, so since I was looking up the address of the Sunnyvale Fry’s store anyway, I copied and pasted all their Bay Area stores into my MapMaker spreadsheet template and made a Yahoo! Map of Bay Area Fry’s Electronics stores. Enjoy!
Very exciting to see that Yahoo! Widgets, del.icio.us and Flickr made the Lifehacker Best Apps of 2005 list today.
It’s been fun and inspiring to work with the Widgets and Flickr teams in 2005 and I’m looking forward to doing more with del.icio.us in 2006 now that they’re part of our pulsating purple family. And big thanks to Lifehacker for all the love you’ve shown us this year!
We launched some new web services APIs for Yahoo! Travel today, Dan has details on his blog. These new APIs support the JSON serialization format we announced last week. Party!
Today we launched a new feature of Yahoo! Search called Open Shortcuts. This lets you do certain types of searches quickly. It’s also customizable. For instance, to search eBay from the Yahoo! search page:
You can also define your own shortcuts in the search box. I made my own shortcut to search the Yahoo! Developer Network site by following these steps:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?vs=developer.yahoo.net&va=%s
The "%s" is a special character that specifies that you should replace this with whatever you entered in the search box.
To save the shortcut, click on the Set button.
Now when you go to any Y! search box you can enter !dev javascript (or whatever) and you’re taken to search results for ‘javascript’ on the Yahoo! Developer Network site.
Remember that this works from any Yahoo! search box, including the search boxes you find at the top of nearly every Yahoo! page, as well as the Yahoo! search box in Firefox, etc.
I’m pretty sure you have to be logged in to Yahoo! for this to work.
There is also a shortcut for creating shortcuts, it’s the ‘set’ command. I used this to create a search shortcut for MSDN (Microsoft’s developer site):
!set msdn http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdn-online/shared/components/mscomsearch30.aspx?qu=%s
(That should be all entered in the box as one entry; it looks like it’s going to word-wrap on this page.)
As I walk the earth attempting to fulfill my mission of helping software developers do their thing, I’ve stumbled upon a few important truths. One of these truths is that even though we aspire to an open, agnostic world, developers still tend to live in one programming language or another. So it’s good to build out that last mile of support to developers in their language of choice.
So it is with great pride that we roll out the first in a series of language-specific developer centers at Yahoo! — the Yahoo! JavaScript Developer Center. This is a collection of links, articles and code examples intended for use by Javascript developers who are interested in using Yahoo! technology to build applications. Our support for Javascript is vast — from AJAX applications, to widgets, to Maps, there’s quite a lot there.
One of the gems of today’s launch is our support for JSON. This is a Web services paradigm that makes it much easier for developers to create AJAX applications that run in the browser without the need for an intermediate proxy server, by safely bypassing cross-browser scripting restrictions. It’s a super cool and easy way to create dynamic applications that use Yahoo! web services in Javascript.
I don’t normally like to preannounce products, but I should mention that we are working on a few more interesting additions to the JavaScript developer center that we’ll add soon. We are also planning additional language-specific developer centers (PHP and .NET are a few that we’re interested in making available soon).
Finally, the most excellent Laura of my team pulled all this today and burned the midnight oil to create new content for the center. I’m sure you’ll agree that she did a terrific job. If you have feedback or would like to ask questions about our offerings for Javascript developers, please join our Javascript developers Yahoo! group.
Very exciting to see del.icio.us joining Yahoo! today.
They’ve got XML APIs as well as a JSON interface, which means that as of today, we’re supporting them on the Y! Developer Network, hooray!
JSON is a very interesting way to build AJAX applications without having to proxy the Web service data on your own server; with JSON, you pull down a JavaScript object directly to the browser client instead of retrieving an XML document, formatting that into HTML on your server, and blasting that page to the client.
Connect the dots: Flickr, Upcoming.org, blo.gs, del.icio.us. What do they have in common? They all had APIs for developers in place before we bought them. Something to ponder.
Just released a new version of my Excel spreadsheet that lets you plot data on a Yahoo! Map, this makes an adjustment to get around a server side change that made the template unusable by just about everybody. It’s now fixed, hooray!
People have asked me to add geocoding to this and I’ll try to get around to adding that, maybe over the holidays. I also want to add the ability to specify custom icons for each map position, which shouldn’t be too difficult.
I’m looking to hire a product manager to join the developer network team at Yahoo. We’re looking for someone pretty senior and technical, preferably with lots of experience working with developers and web services. Click the link below for the full description; drop me a line (my first name and last name @ yahoo.com) if you or someone you know is interested.
This is just amazing…Justin did a few fully interactive skins on top of our new maps product to demonstrate how you can use Flash to tailor maps to look like your web site.
Yahoo! Local GM and amateur blog critic Paul Levine and I are in IMs right now, watching the returns on the launch meander through the blogosphere via Technorati.
Paul Levine: btw, when you talk about only-at-yahoo features, i usually point to 5:
Paul Levine: 1) multi-point directions
Paul Levine: 2) drag-and-drop interactivity
Paul Levine: 3) reverse business lookup
Paul Levine: 4) address book integration / autocomplete
Paul Levine: 5) minimap
Paul Levine: plus things like traffic and send-to-phone which we launched almost a year ago and still noone else has
Jeffrey McManus: somebody should blog all that
Paul Levine: yea — who?
Jeffrey McManus: if only we knew somebody with a blog
Paul Levine: ha
