Yahoo! Flash (R) Blog

With a Little App from my Friends

No doubt you’ve heard a little something about Yahoo!’s new open strategy. If you attended Open Hack Day, you would’ve even been able to use the new Social APIs, which allow you to build powerful social applications on our Yahoo! Applications Platform (YAP).

Not to let down the Flash folks, we’ve created some nice AS3 APIs that let you easily integrate social data and create a Flash or Flex application easily in YAP. There’s even a great Yahoo! theme for Flex applications, to give you a standard look and feel right from the start.

If you’re itching to see what this is all about, it’s currently available as a preview release at http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/yos. While you won’t be able to actually use the services (sorry, coming soon), you can get a head start on learning the system and even begin developing your apps, as the code and documentation are all there for the taking. There’s even lots of source code for example applications, so you can be one step ahead of your friends.[Edit: it's now released!]

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Good Will Hacking

It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault! It’s all ours, we swear. We started this thing, called a hack day, so that Yahoos could showcase their creative chops in a 24-hour long battle of code, written in multiple languages and on various platforms. Lots of the little projects showcased at hack days later became full-fledged products, and as time went on, more and more of us started participating. And then the whole thing just grew way too big for our shoes, and the next thing you know – we had to kick the doors off the hinges and open it to the public.

The first Open Hack Day, back in 2006, was a smashing success. Coders from all over the place converged on Yahoo! campus, for a day and a night full of code, music (Beck himself showed up to perform live for them!), pizza, beer, Red Bull, and conversation. Local TV stations had helicopters covering the event (okay, I am exaggerating, but they did send out correspondents), and the projects we saw come out of that Hack Day were simply mind-blowing. Wonderful prizes (a huge flat panel TV, among other things) were duly and deservedly awarded.

This year, we are going for an encore of what will hopefully become a long-standing tradition. And though we’ve seen quite a few Flash hacks in the last Hack Day, we always love to see more. So, if you believe you’ve got what it takes, and can take Friday, September the 12th off, get thee to http://www.hackday.org and apply at once (the event is invitation-only). Among all kinds of prizes, we are setting up a special “Best Flash Hack” prize, and who knows — you may be its lucky recipient! And though, just as last year, we are keeping the name of the artist who will perform for the lucky hackers on Friday night under wraps, let’s just say it’s going to be someone really cool!

To summarize:

What: Yahoo! Open Hack Day.
Where: Yahoo! Sunnyvale Campus.
When: September 12th, 8:00AM — September 13th, whenever, and don’t even think about sleeping that night.
How: By invitation only, apply at http://www.hackday.org

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Yahoo! Music API: Listen

The Yahoo! Music API  is up and running. You can browse similar artists, gather more info than you ever wanted to know about a particular artist, get lists such as the most popular artists, and get user recommendations and ratings, to name a few. There’s also an easy-to-integrate Flash video player to let you embed music videos on your site.

The API has a liberal Flash policy file, so Flash and Flex developers can use it in their applications worry-free. Time to hone those E4X skills.

Note: The proper version of Flash Player is not installed or JavaScript is not enabled. Unable to display SWF content.

The above example shows the top 25 artists in a Flex BubbleChart. The y axis shows popularity, with the most popular artists on top. The x axis shows the change since the last time the chart was taken, and the size of the bubbles is determined by the track count of the artist on Yahoo! Music.

Hover your mouse over the bubbles for more info. Click here for the source. (Note that this example also covers custom data functions for using complex XML in Flex charts, if you are so inclined.)

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