Yahoo! Flash(R) Blog

Hello, My Name Is Badge Kit

Have we seemed a bit quiet lately? Not without reason of course–we’ve been busy working on a great new piece of software for you folks. Have you heard of badges? They’re those little widgets all the cool kids have on their sites, used to display stuff in a compact and fun way. Yahoo! offers a number of badges you can easily grab and place on your site such as OMG and Answers…but what if those just aren’t good enough? Well, then it’s time to make your own!

That’s why we’ve been working to create the Badge Kit, the quick and easy tool for creating badges and widgets for deployment on the web and beyond. We want to make it easier to create badges. You don’t have to be an AJAX or Flash wizard to create a badge with our kit, all you need to do is write some simple XML. The result is a lightweight Flash badge that can be customized and placed on your site with minimal effort. That means you get all the benefits of a sleek, flashy interface without all the hard work.

With the Badge Kit, you instantly have access to the Flash CS3 components, you can integrate filters and transitions, and can even use the new ASTRA library. Yep, we mean those ASTRA components such as AutoComplete, Tree, and Charts can be used without a line of scripting. In fact, most any third-party Flash CS3 component can be used in the Badge Kit–all with simple, declarative markup similar to Flex.

Coupled with the newest version of the Yahoo! Widget Engine, you can also turn your badge into a Yahoo! Widget. Using the artist formerly known as Konfabulator, your fancy little badge can become a fun and informative widget on someone’s desktop.

This is a beta release, and we feel confident in sharing it with you all. Heck, we’re proud of it. We think this is a step in the right direction for the new Yahoo!. Being open-source, you get to see the inner workings, and you can even extend and optimize the kit for your own uses. We’ve got big plans for some great features, but why not get started now?

We want you to know that this is the the same kit we’re using here at home, so expect some innovative and fun badges from the various properties at Yahoo! very soon. Note that we’ve already got a plethora of open web service APIs, including Yahoo! Search and Flickr, which you’re free to use to create a badge. We hope you’ll use the Badge Kit to create a unique badge of your own, and share it with the community.

Try out the Badge Kit!

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