Yahoo! Flash (R) Blog

Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) for the Rest of Us

In the last article, I hinted at Yahoo!’s Open Strategy, and mentioned that there were a few tools available for Flash and Flex developers: http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/yos. We’ve polished it up and it’s ready for release. So head on over and start developing!

To read more about Y!OS, check this out.

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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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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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Here’s Looking at You, FlashForward

Last week, Yahoo! Flash Platform team attended the FlashForward 2008 conference in San Francisco. We had a wonderful time at the great variety of sessions and presentations, and had a few things of our own to show and tell.

In particular, we were at the FlashForward Job Fair, talking about all the great opportunities Yahoo! has for Flash and Flex developers. You can find a full list of the open positions at careers.yahoo.com.

We also dropped in on the end-of-conference Jam-Slam session, where we decided to go whimsical and throw some things at the audience. Well, not so much “things” of a “heavy steel ball” variety, but rather ideas, little snippets of Flash apps we thought would be incredibly cool to see built.  You’d be surprised how many good ideas one can fit into the two minutes of allotted time.

Although the presentation at the conference itself was without slides, I added some slides to it and re-recorded it for your entertainment. Here’s what we had to say:

The services and APIs mentioned in this little pep talk were: Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Live, Yahoo! Maps AS3 API, Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Music. And of course, the links at the end of the talk lead you to our developer center and a sign-up page for the wonderful Open Hack Day (we’ll blog about it separately).

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New and Updated Flash Components and ActionScript 3 Utilities in Yahoo! Astra 1.2

To borrow the favorite word of a certain Time Lord, “Fantastic!” The latest update to the Yahoo! Astra libraries for Flash, Flex and ActionScript is like a shiny new sonic screwdriver for your AS3 toolbox. Several existing components got some important updates, and we have a plethora of new layout containers for Flash CS3 that we hope will excite the RIA-building masses. Additionally, we’ve added the new Astra Utilities library with some excellent non-component extras that should come in handy. Don’t forget, it’s even bigger on the inside.

New Layout Containers added to the Flash Components:

• HBoxPane and VBoxPane are containers that arrange children in a horizontal row or vertical column.
• FlowPane is a container that arranges its children using a left-to-right flow similar to a document.
• TilePane is a container that arranges its children inside a grid of tiled rectangles.
• BorderPane is a container that arranges its children by constraining them to certain positions, such as a top header, bottom footer, left and right sidebars, and a stretching center content area.

New Utilities:

• Animation is a very lightweight tween engine with a simple API. Powers the animations in Charts and other Astra components.
• Layout provides the core infrastructure for adding layout containers to a UI control framework. Not a ready-made component, but an abstract set of classes and interfaces meant to be extended.

Among updates to the existing components and libraries:

• The Charts for Flash CS3 have received a healthy update, including support for legends, many enhancements to LineSeries, and several adjustments to styles that allow more flexibility.
• The MenuBar component fixed a bug with dataProvider resets and can now be explicitly sized rather than only fitting to the text size.
• The TabBar component can also be explicitly resized and there’s a new property that controls focus and selection behavior.
• The Yahoo! Maps Communication Kit for Flex has been removed from the Astra Web APIs package in favor of the official new ActionScript 3.0 API for Yahoo! Maps.
• The Aquarium example on the Flash Developer Center has been updated to use the updated components.

Ride the waves of time on over to the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center to read the documentation, check out the examples, and download the new builds. Don’t forget to tell us what you’ve done with all our components and libraries on the ydn-flash group.

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Yahoo! Maps Example: Collaboration Using Blaze DS

Adobe’s Christophe Coenraets recently wrote an article for Adobe Developer Connection titled Yahoo! Maps collaboration using Flex and BlazeDS. It features an example Flex application built around the Yahoo! Maps API for ActionScript 3. Using Blaze DS, the application keeps the map view synchronized between multiple clients. Users can even draw on the map and chat in a collaborative environment.

Very cool! Great example, Christophe.

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Flickr: Now Even More Flash-friendly

As you are all surely well-aware, Flickr is one of Yahoo!’s most Flash-friendly properties. And how could it not be? With a crossdomain-enabled API and a thorough AS3 wrapper available from Adobe, Flickr-based RIAs are a joy to develop. But today, our good friends at Flickr lent us a helping hand yet again, and added a liberal crossdomain file to their photo servers. The new crossdomain.xml file (located at http://static.flickr.com/crossdomain.xml) now gives all of your Flash apps full access to a whole universe of photographic goodness. And by full access we mean “really-really full”, with BitmapData readily acessible for every single photo.

And what does that actually mean? Well, just to whet your appetite, it means that you can now import photos from Flickr as actual Bitmaps, rather than generic DisplayObjects, and as such, you can make all the visual transforms anti-aliased by setting Bitmap’s smoothing property to true. In the example below, we load the same image from Flickr twice: on the left, it’s presented as a Bitmap, with smoothing turned on. On the right, it’s shown as a DisplayObject (as it would be if there weren’t a crossdomain.xml file). Now try pressing the button to make the images spin.

Please install Flash 9 to see this example.

Rotation is a pretty simple transform, but can you see the remarkable difference? The image on the right looks like there are ants crawling all over it, whereas the image on the left is stoic and smooth, like a Spartan. This will also hold true for all other transforms, both simple (scaling, transposing, etc.) and complex.

The fun, of course, doesn’t end here. With access to BitmapData, you can efficiently crop the images you load, make fast bitmap collages, analyze image’s colors and edges, perhaps even do clever visual transformations (an “AndyWarholizer”, anyone? We’ll feature it if you build it!)—the possibilities are really making our heads spin like the images above. So please, go out, build Flickr-based apps, let us know about it and make us proud. But of course, when you do, kindly remember to observe Flickr’s Terms of Service, which among other things, ask you (quite nicely) to link all images you load back to their original Flickr pages.

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