22 Feb 2008
After couple of hours, I have come up with simple mashup that uses Yahoo! Live API, Yahoo! Maps (AS3 library) and Yahoo! Pipes. This mashup, simply, shows live broadcasts (channels) on the map.
Check out the mashup!
I love new Yahoo! Maps AS3 libarary, Yahoo! Live and more than these, I love Yahoo! Pipes, it’s cool. I created a pipe in ten minutes and which saved (actually deleted) at least fifty (50) lines of code to handle Yahoo! Live API calls, results, get geo-data and aggregate.
Consuming Yahoo! Live API requires many HTTP requests to get data, whereas with Yahoo! Pipes, one request is good enough. I know, Yahoo! Pipes is doing most of thing on it’s server but it does help us and users.
Yahoo! Live server doesn’t have liberal crossdomain.xml (policy-file), so I needed proxy on my server, that’s not even required with Yahoo! Pipes, so lots of server-bandwidth saved :-)
Check out the Yahoo! Pipe, I created.
You might not see all the live-channels on map because most of the Yahoo! Live users have not updated their profile with their locations(city, state, country) in their profile. So it’s hard to get geo-data with existing API, hence those channels are not shown on map.
Sometimes you might see inactive channels on map, that’s due to Y! Pipes’ caching, I am looking into it.
I would write some more details of the application and code. Once I am done with:-
- channels within markers
- status messages
- AIR app - each channel can be unpinned to a native-window
- drag & drop markers on desktop to create shortcuts to channels
- and other things.
Technorati tags: yahoo, live, yahoo live, maps, pipes, mashup
19 Feb 2008
It seems you can’t set most of the standard http headers in Adobe Flashlite, you can set some custom headers. Ok, it’s just like Adobe Flash player security sandbox, but why?
Most of the flashlite applications run in standalone player, not in browser on devices. How I am going to take care of http authentication or similar things. There is no support for more http methods, like head or conditional get requests which make more sense in case of mobile application which run under limited data plan or there is no broadband like stuff for most of users.
I wrote a proof of concept twitter application that runs on flashlite. I want to update it to be like other available apps. I am stuck because Flashlite 3.0 doesn’t let you set Authorization header, whereas, Flashlite 2.0 allows that. There are more issues, like you can’t set http headers in GET request.
Most of these issues also exist in Adobe Flash player, some are security restrictions which make sense for web applications but don’t make sense for mobile applications, as mentioned earlier.
It seems Adobe doesn’t get enough feedback in pre-release cycles or doesn’t consider for various reasons. Get me on pre-release cycle :-)
Adobe Flashlite rocks, but it has to go a long way, in order to compete with other technologies. It’s not always about video, vector drawing, eye candies, standalone games, great visual design, xml parsing or sockets; application development requires more.
---posted via mobile---
16 Feb 2008
Ted Patrick is working on a project “30onair”. He is asking people to create/record thirty (30) seconds videos to share their views on either of these:
- Why AIR?
- Why Flash?
- Why Flex?
You can create videos, upload to YouTube and tag the video with “30onair”. Check out Ted’s post for more details.
I love this initiative because I can express myself and can be heard :-) As usual, Ted has come up with another great idea, he has been doing fantastic job as an evangelist.
I also recorded my version, where I am talking more about use-case instead of technology.
Technorati tags: 30onair, air
15 Feb 2008
YouTube has put up a very liberal crossdomain.xml policy file, which would allow flash/flex apps consume it’s GData based API without any server-side proxy.
You can read more on YouTube api-blog.
Technorati tags: youtube, crossdomain, gdata, api
15 Feb 2008
We hear people asking questions, how to make swf (more) searchable? Is SWF searchable?
Not many people know, most of the search engines index text within swf files. My question is:
Should SWF need to be searchable?
I have got different opinion on this entire idea:
- SWF is not content rather an application.
- To make it searchable, it require special effort, which doesn’t make sense.
- hardcoded text in swf
- extra deep-linking workarounds, apart from basic support, to instantiate view-state
Some questions:
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Should search-engines index applications?
-
Does desktop-search index desktop-applications (executables)?
Why do we need to prove swf is a good option? I think, it is. The whole idea of searchability applies to content, and I already said swf should not be seen as content (like html, xml, text, etc).
I can imagine a few ways to add search support without doing special workarounds, these are known things:
- As we know, it’s good practice to have support for deep-linking or REST URIs
- Having that in place, metadata can be injected in html-wrapper or a supporting xml file with all possible deep-links to view-states within Flash/Flex apps (swf)?
Structure (view metadata - heading, some info, etc) of application can be semantically encoded in html with appropriate deep-links to views in an application.
What you think about it?
Technorati tags: swf, search, deep linking, index
11 Feb 2008
In my previous post, I mentioned about Mogulus while talking about Yahoo! Live. I thought, Yahoo! Live is like Mogulus but after playing with Y! Live, I realized it’s totally different.
Mogulus is like a tv-channel and users(who broadcast) get their own studio. They can create content using existing data (video, images, text, audio, live-video-audio-feed) and do the programming (scheduling). Think of a tv-news-channel, where not only you get to see live-feed but various stories are in form of video, audio, text, images, etc.
Mogulus targets different audience, however, it would be great to see, if Mogulus allows embedding Yahoo! Live feeds in content/channels. Yahoo! Live has a developer API which can be used to fetch details about live-channels and embed in any app, even flash/flex apps. Not a bad idea though.
I think, Y! Live is very close to Ustream (and other similar services). BTW! Ustream allows an user to record the entire session (video, audio, chat) which can be played back later.
Technorati tags: mogulus, yahoo live, ustream, broadcast, channel, live
11 Feb 2008
Just figured out, you can open Yahoo! Live in different tabs/windows and broadcast works everywhere. That’s the coolness of LocalConnection. Simple algorithm, check if there is already an established-connection, use it, sweet :-)
10 Feb 2008
I know it’s old story now but I thought of posting about. Yahoo! Live is cool, I can see some interesting live channels.
The main Yahoo! Live application is done using Adobe Flex and using the power of the Flash Platform. Well do they have any better choice to do video/audio on web ? ;-)
Just wondering, how Mogulus and UStream are taking this news?
BTW! Does Y! Live filter f*** word in chat or voice-chat? I was on one of the channels and heard (beep) it getting filtered? If yes, how is audio-filtering happening in real-time?
Technorati tags: Yahoo Live, broadcast, mogulus, ustream
10 Feb 2008
Yesterday at DevCamp, one interesting session was about Semantic Web and skepticism around it. I listened different perspectives. I realized, some part of discussion was around:
- How to make web more semantic?
- Does annotating all data (existing or future) using microformats, rdf, etc make sense?
- Should we really need to annotate everything ourselves?
- What about non-technical users who use/contribute-to web?
- What about smart algorithms/tools that can make meaning out of existing web without us doing much?
I have been advocating/using microformats for sometime, which is totally useful but above questions also make sense? Yesterday’s discussion made me think more about [it] and I started finding about different perspectives/realities. I found an informative article series on ReadWriteWeb.
Let’s help some web more structured, as said in readwriteweb article above, by tagging, annotating, etc as much as we can. We can also spread the word. Most importantly, we developers can write smart tools that can capture and expose the data in structured-way. Every bit helps and that’s what I said in yesterday’s discussion, the idea is to make things better. Sooner or later, we would have a perfect web, well there is nothing perfect but you got what I mean :-)
BTW! If you want to feel how tools/user-experience would get better with Semantic Web, Check out of Adaptive Blue extensions (BlueOrganizer and SmartLinks) to browser (s). These tools recognize data/object/information in a web-page and provide you very contextualized choices (action items). They are doing things using existing, mostly unstructured web, imagine - how things would be structured web i.e. semantic-web?
You can explore it but let me give a simple example. Suppose you are reading movie review of Transformers on IMDB. Adaptive Blue tool would deduct about director, movie-name, casts, etc and provide you relevant choices/options like:-
- add to twitter, bookmark, delicious, facebook, etc
- comparisons from various sources
- Transformers pages on wikipedia, amazon, netflix, etc
- Rent from netflix, etc
- Michael Bay (the director of the movie)’s movies on amazon, images on flickr, blogs on google, etc
- list of stars and related links
There are so many contextualized choices, I don’t want to list all of them. However, you can see the screenshot and check out the extensions.
I am wondering, is it something that can cause privacy concern? If they are collecting page-info on their server?
Update (Feb 11, 2008): Reuters has announced OpenCalais service API, which analyzes the data (text, html, xml), processes it to a semantic content by returning RDF/XML and also stores the processed data in it’s server for future searches, it can be disabled via API params. You can check out this sample app.
Technorati tags: semantic web, microformats, adaptive blue, blueorganizer, smartlinks
09 Feb 2008
I am in DevCamp, currently sitting in Mozilla Prism session. I attended some interesting sessions:
During my session (on AIR, AJAX centric), I ran out of time and couldn’t complete it. I should have scheduled one hour instead of thirty minutes. I got pissed off and didn’t talk about Media RSS. BarCamp/DevCamp should have longer sessions, otherwise it sucks.
Some people seemed to be interested in AIR, asked about it’s availability on different platforms (Linux, Mobile etc). I have uploaded my presentation-slides on slideshare.net, you can download the PDF or see the presentation below:-
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Note: Most of the images used in this presentation are from Adobe slides/articles and screenshots of various AIR apps. Please let me know, if I can not keep those images, however, I feel it’s fair use.
Technorati tags: devcamp, bangalore, devcamp08, air
