yahoo! on SWiK

How to submit a XML Sitemap to Yahoo!

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 08:04:34 -0700

What Netscape’s Founder Thinks About the New Google Browser

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:01:20 -0700

Marc Andreessen, whose first startup, Netscape Communications, introduced the consumer web to millions thanks to its Netscape browser, seems to be suitably impressed by Google’s recently released Chrome browser. He waxed eloquent about Chrome during an onstage conversation with Portfolio magazine contributing editor Kevin Maney at The Churchill Club in Palo Alto, Calif. “Any desktop application that has not been implemented in the browser is now going to be implemented in the browser,” Andreessen said. It was an idea he had espoused over a decade ago.

Blown away by the speed of the browser, and its radical and innovative JavaScript engine, Andreessen called the launch of Chrome an “extraordinary event.” He said that it is going to make Firefox and Internet Explorer compete actively with Chrome and that it would ultimately boost browsers as a whole. Mozilla CEO John Lilly had shared similar sentiments in an interview earlier this week.

“Microsoft can build good products when they want to,” he said. The barons of Redmond released a version of Internet Explorer that was superior to a bloated version of Netscape and gave it away for free, driving a stake through Netscape’s heart. That’s ancient history, anyway. Andreessen thinks that IE and Firefox will have to accelerate their plans and introduce new technologies. He thinks that all this is going to boost the performance of JavaScript. Giving into nostalgia for a minute, he pointed out that it was 10 feet away from his desk at Netscape that JavaScript first got going. He said.

More than a decade later it is everywhere. “If JavaScript gets any faster, then developers will question if they should develop in Flash or (Microsoft’s) Silverlight (technologies),”
“Super interactive browser that sits atop a super-fast connection…now interesting things will happen over the next 5-10 years,” he said. While he talked at length about Facebook, Twitter, Qik and Ning, it was his comments about the Chrome browser that were quite interesting.

Why? Because back in the day he was one of the first few people to talk about the browser as an operating environment. I had bought into the concept then, and I buy into it now. With always-on connections feeding networked devices and mobile phones, the browser-as-an-operating-environment is close to becoming a reality.

During the Q&A session, in response to a question, Andreessen said the share of Google’s browser market share depends on the company’s ability to fully productize the browser and then distribute it.

P.S.: I tried to take notes as fast as I could, but since Marc speaks too fast I apologize if some of the quotes might be wee bit mangled.

Yahoo! Developer Network - Flash Developer Center - ASTRA Flash Components - Aquarium

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:01:33 -0700

Yahoo! Maps, Driving Directions, and Traffic

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:58:57 -0700

Old Picture of the Day

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 13:59:09 -0700

Twitter Friends Stream

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:59:45 -0700

mashup, twitter, yahoo!, yui

É agora! O tal eclipse promovido pelo Yahoo!

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:11:25 -0700

Depois de tanta espera... aconteceu o eclipse lunar feito pelo Yahoo! Brasil... e as novidades não param por aí! A noite é uma criança...

YUI 3: The goals are lighter, faster, consistent, power, secure

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:11:08 -0700

YUI 3 has a preview release for us to check out.

The goals are:

lighter (less K-weight on the wire and on the page for most uses)
faster (fewer http requests, less code to write and compile, more efficient code)
more consistent (common naming, event signatures, and widget APIs throughout the library)
more powerful (do more with less implementation code)
more securable (safer and easier to expose to multiple developers working in the same environment; easier to run under systems like Caja or ADsafe)

What's New

Sandboxing: Each YUI instance on the page can be self-contained, protected and limited (YUI().use()). This segregates it from other YUI instances, tailors the functionality to your specific needs, and lets different versions of YUI play nicely together.
Modularity: YUI 3 is architected to use smaller modular pieces, giving you fine-grained control over what functionality you put on the page. If you simply want to make something draggable, you can include the dd-drag submodule, which is a small subset of the Drag & Drop Utility.
Self-completing: As long as the basic YUI seed file is in place, you can make use of any functionality in the library. Tell YUI what modules you want to use, tie that to your implementation code, and YUI will bring in all necessary dependencies in a single HTTP request before executing your code.
Selectors: Elements are targeted using intuitive CSS selector idioms, making it easy to grab an element or a group of elements whenever you’re performing an operation.
Custom Events++: Custom Events are even more powerful in YUI 3.0, with support for bubbling, stopping propagation, assigning/preventing default behaviors, and more. In fact, the Custom Event engine provides a common interface for DOM and API events in YUI 3.0, creating a consistent idiom for all kinds of event-driven work.
Nodes and NodeLists: Element references in YUI 3.0 are mediated by Node and NodeList facades. Not only does this make implementation code more expressive (Y.Node.get("#main ul li").addClass("foo");), it makes it easier to normalize differences in browser behavior (Y.Node.get("#promo").setStyle("opacity", .5);).
Chaining: We’ve paid attention throughout the new architecture to the return values of methods and constructors, allowing for a more compressed chaining syntax in implementation code.

Some example snippets

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

// Creates a YUI instance with the node module (and any dependencies) and adds the class "enabled" to the element with the id of "demo".
YUI().use('node', function(Y) {
Y.get('#demo').addClass('enabled');
});
// Creates an instance of YUI with basic drag functionality (a subset of the dd module), and makes the element with the id of "demo" draggable.
YUI().use('dd-drag', function(Y) {
var dd = new Y.DD.Drag({
node: '#demo'
});
});
// Adds the class "enabled" to the all elements with the className "demo".
Y.all('.demo').addClass('enabled');
// Sets the title attribute of all elements with the className "demo" and removes the class "disabled" from each.
Y.all('.demo').set('title', 'Ready!').removeClass('disabled');
// Adds the Drag plugin to the element with the id "demo", and enables all of its h2 children drag as handles.
Y.get('#demo').plug(Y.Plugin.Drag, {
handles: 'h2'
});
// Attaches a DOM event listener to all anchor elements that are children of the element with the id "demo". The event handler prevents the anchor from navigating and then sets a value for the innerHTML of the first em element of the clicked anchor.
Y.on('click', function(e) {
e.preventDefault();
e.target.query('em').set('innerHTML', 'clicked');
}, '#demo a');

Very exciting stuff to the team. I look forward to seeing a full up code repository too!

Yahoo! Music Blog " Introducing the Yahoo! Music API

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:09:24 -0700

Zimbra Desktop gives Yahoo Mail offline access

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:11:51 -0700

The first real fruits of Yahoo's $350 million acquisition of Zimbra are becoming apparent with the release Thursday of the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop.

GigaOM Interview: Michael Dell, CEO & Founder of Dell Inc.

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:59:57 -0700

Last week, at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech Conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., I caught up with Michael Dell, founder and chief executive officer of Dell Inc., the Round Rock, Texas-based computer hardware maker. He’s been trying to get Dell’s mojo back for over a year now, and in the past three months, things have started to come together, with sales, profits and the company’s stock price beginning to move in the right direction.

We had a wide-ranging conversation, one that covered everything from cloud computing to the likelihood of Dell entering the smartphone business to the advantages of being a founder. Below are edited excerpts from my chat with the eighth richest man in the U.S., who is as humble today as the day he started selling computers from his college dorm room.

On cloud computing

Om Malik: Will Dell ever start offering its own cloud services?

Michael Dell: Today, we sell to the guys who make clouds. We actually already have some services that we provide; you can think of them as software-as-a-service. For example, for managing your infrastructure, we purchased a number of companies recently like Everdream that are all services provided online. We’ve got a huge business in managing the computing infrastructure for large companies.

Om: What do you do as a company to become a leader in (cloud) client computers?

Dell: For the last eight years, here in the U.S., we’ve sold more computers than any company in the world. In fact, last quarter our lead kind of widened relative to the No. 2 company. Mobile Internet devices and smartphones are all part of our mobile computer business. Our focus is on the bull’s-eye of the volume, which today is notebooks, computers and laptops.

The interesting question is these “Internet-in-the-pocket” kind of things. Do those replace the notebook, or are they a compliment to the notebook? That is the kind of threshold question one would think about as you explore this.

Om: It is actually a complimentary device. But I think the bigger opportunity is in buying those devices because they can be replaced every six months.

Dell: No question, this is a large and significant opportunity and it’s one — I think you will see Dell move in that direction. But I think it will be sequenced in the right order relative to all the opportunities we have.

Om: What do you think is the biggest opportunity for Dell?

Dell: We have identified five big opportunities. When I say big, I’m talking about $5-$10 billion dollars each in terms of scale opportunities. They are the consumer business, mobile computers, emerging countries, enterprise, and small/medium business. We [have] reorganized the company around these key priorities.

On smartphones

Om: Any plans for mobile phones or smartphones?

Dell: We are certainly looking at the whole smartphone category, but I wouldn’t expect anything anytime soon.

Om: With the emergence of Google’s Android, and with Symbian OS and Microsoft Mobile already on the market, do you think that makes it easier for Dell to get into the phone business?

Dell: What you’ve got [are] industry-standard platforms upon which applications are being built and ecosystems are being created, and that kind of building-block architecture gives us all sorts of opportunities.

Om: You can be a big game-changer in this market, right? You can decide to work with Android or Symbian. Is there a desire on your part to work with one over the other?

Dell: We’re not ready to publicly disclose our plans there…we’re kind of working on that.

On being a founder

Om: From your perspective as a founder, what makes a founder/CEO different than a professional CEO?

Dell: The founder has special permission to make changes at a company. There have been two or three times within the history of the company where we’ve made some pretty dramatic changes; the last year and a half has been a good example of that. When I told our company that the direct model has been a great revolution for the industry but it’s not a religion, that was actually a pretty big shock to a lot of our people. Some of them thought it was a religion.

I think as a founder you get special permission to call into question things from the past, and it is up to you to figure out how to do that.

Om: So it’s almost like a political job in that sense.

Dell: I think there’s a lot of equity and trust that gets built up in the company over time. And when we’ve laid out the priorities in the organization — if we’ve done a good job and people see the results and they can see how their efforts apply to their success, and how they can realize their own dreams at the company — then they kind of say, “These guys know what they’re doing.”

On the future

Om: My impression has always been that your biggest competitive advantage was your supply chain; you fine-tuned it to such a level that others couldn’t compete. That has actually evolved over a period of time because others have started to think like the “Dell” way. What is the next competitive advantage going forward?

Dell: I think it’s true that we have had and have a supply-chain advantage. If you look at, for example, return on equity, you’ll see that our return on equity or vested capital [has been] massively higher than our competitors and still is today.

That advantage is very much intact in terms of the capital efficiency of the business. But I think that is really only part of the story. What informs that advantage is the connection we have with customers and the information that customers convey to us in the process. By knowing exactly what customers want and being able to build that and provide products and services tailored to customers’ needs and being able to personalize products — that creates significant advantage and significant growth possibilities for us.

Photo Courtesy of Dell Inc.

Yahoo! Search BOSS - YDN

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:51:48 -0700

Thunderbird - Reclaim your inbox

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:53:31 -0700

A great email client that downloads emails for offline view, manages multiple accounts (including Yahoo, Aim & Gmail) and manages RSS news feeds. Open-source.

Thunderbird - Reclaim your inbox

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:49:26 -0700

A great email client that downloads emails for offline view, manages multiple accounts (including Yahoo, Aim & Gmail) and manages RSS news feeds. Open-source.

Yahoo! Search BOSS - YDN

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:46:39 -0700

Yahoo! Search BOSS - YDN

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:47:12 -0700

Y!Q Search Results(The Economic Motivati...keholder Perspectives)

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:46:19 -0700

Results of Yahoo! Q: http://yq.search.yahoo.com/publisher/index.html for "The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives"

Yahoo! Answers - Home

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 23:31:58 -0700

http://answers.yahoo.com/

Nails on a Chalkboard: The Google Chat Notification Sound

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:54:39 -0700

There’s a scene in the movie “Dumb and Dumber” in which Jim Carrey asks, “Do you want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?” And then he screeches at the top of his lungs. If that movie was made today you could easily substitute Carrey’s screaming for the notification sound Google Chat makes.

You are feverishly working on deadline, concentrating to craft the perfect sent-
Dunk!…
-ence, when that noise cuts through your mind as your-
Dunk!…
mental train goes careening off its rails.
DUNK!DUNK!DUNK!

Arrrgh. Who is it, and what the @*&#$ do you want?!

Om’s talked about Gmail sucking, but this is a bigger threat to productivity, since at some point it will drive me insane and I’ll take everyone with me.

Does it have to be such an unpleasant, angry, sound? Especially since it repeats the noise until you switch windows and read the damn message? A jackhammer would be less obnoxious. And the only option in the settings menu is to turn the sound off, which really isn’t helpful when someone is trying to urgently reach you.

Why not a few options, Google? I don’t need the sound of puppies making rainbows or bunny rabbits blowing kisses, but there has to be a less harsh noise than the one you dumped into such an important communication tool for the modern worker. Heck, you could even slip in the biddy-biddy sound from 411-GOOG.

DUNK!

Yahoo's desperate search times call for open source

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 08:48:02 -0700

Yahoo! Search BOSS - YDN

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 05:45:11 -0700

Yahoo! Search BOSS - YDN

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:49:07 -0700

YPulse: Fades and Pulsations Library

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:46:24 -0700

Kent Johnson has released YPulse a simple open source wrapper for the YUI Animation library that makes creating highlight fades and pulsing button glows a bit easier.

You pulse away with something like:

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

var pulser = new YAHOO.squarebits.YPulse(
‘my-div’,
‘backgroundColor’,
‘#FFFFFF’, // starting
‘#FFFF00′, // ending
0.75, // The number of seconds for the start-end transition
0.10, // The number of seconds to wait after completing the start-end transition
0.75, // The number of seconds for the end-start transition
0.75, // The number of seconds to wait after completing the end-start transition
YAHOO.util.Easing.easeBoth, // The YAHOO easing method to use for the start-end transition
YAHOO.util.Easing.easeBoth // The YAHOO easing method to use for the end-start transition
);

Ojay 0.2: easy keyboarding, a validation DSL, and two new UI widgets

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:45:55 -0700

James Coglan has updated Ojay, the chaining wrapper for YUI that we posted on a few months back.

The new release features really simple keyboard and form scripting and couple of new UI widgets, a new event system and a stack of other improvements:

Ojay.Forms. By far the biggest new package, Ojay.Forms sorts out a real pain point for me in terms of app development. It does two things: it provides unobtrusive replacements for the YAHOO.widget.Button family of classes, and it provides a DSL for handling form validation and Ajax submission.

Ojay.Keyboard. The new keyboard package is an abstraction over YAHOO.util.KeyListener that lets you say what mean without worrying about character codes, for example:
Ojay.Keyboard.listen(document, 'ALT SHIFT S', function() {
    // handle key press
});
It lets you group sets of keyboard commands together so you can make context-sensitive keyboard controls, and gives you easy access to enable/disable key events and their default browser responses. Not much more to say except that you should check out the documentation.

We have two new UI packages, Ojay.Overlay and Ojay.Paginator. Overlay gives you a bunch of classes for positioning content on top of the document, producing lightbox effects and the like, and Paginator implements the content slider effect that’s got a lot of attention recently, including the ability to lazy-load pages of content via Ajax, and easy integration with Ojay.History. Both packages come with a collection of events to allow your code to react to changes to the components, just like you would for DOM elements.

Speaking of events, this release introduces Ojay.Observable, a JS.Class module that allows any class to support the on() method used for listening to events. This module underlies the custom events published by all the Ojay components. More information and examples are in the documentation.

Yahoo! Search BOSS - YDN

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 06:49:37 -0700

Yahoo! Search BOSS - YDN

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:49:09 -0700

Yahoo! Search BOSS - YDN

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:50:39 -0700

Search-ability in Flash

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:51:22 -0700

More on the custom Flash player provided to Google and Yahoo! for searching Flash/Flex stuff.

[from bushwald] Search-ability in Flash

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:51:16 -0700

More on the custom Flash player provided to Google and Yahoo! for searching Flash/Flex stuff.

[from bushwald] Adobe boosts Flash media search with Google and Yahoo! | The Register

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:51:15 -0700

"Flash Player...on a search engine's server and checks for Flash.... APIs to simulate the firing up of the content on a web page as part of the search. Without this, search engines can only index static text and links within SWF files."