Developer Goodies & Yahoo Widgets

December 17th, 2007 by yourminis

This latest release is a big one for developers.  We’ve revamped the developer site, starting with a redesign of the overall site navigation, making it cleaner and easier - you should definitely be able to find whatever it is that you’re looking for.  We’ve also updated the tutorials and have included copy/print sample code with line numbers.  And for you Flex developers out there, we now fully support Flex widgets, along with native AS2 and AS3.  Finally, we’ve put together an integrated online widget test console that allows you to write, debug and test your AS3/Flex widget code without having to have any development software on your own machine!

In addition to the developer goodies, we’ve added support for the Yahoo Widget platform as another syndication site.  You can now add any of our widgets to your Yahoo Widget application.  Just click the "Yahoo Widgets" icon in the copy panel:

copypanel

As always, we’re looking forward to hearing your comments in our forums.

Mac Dashboard, Enhanced Facebook & OpenSocial Support + More

November 26th, 2007 by yourminis

This latest
update, which went live on Wednesday night - just before Thanksgiving
- brings about a number of great additions to the yourminis platform.

  • Mac
    Dashboard Support - You’ll see that we’ve added Mac Dashboard as one of
    our syndication options.  The "copy" panel lists the Mac Dashboard on
    all of our widgets, and if you’re running Leopard, all you have to do
    is click on the icon and run the file to see the widget of your choice
    running in your dashboard environment.
  • Enhanced Facebook
    Support - We’ve done a number of things to improve our support for
    Facebook.  First, we’ve created an "edit" page, for those of you that
    want to reconfigure your widget in a dedicated area, outside of your
    profile page.  Next, we’ve added a "Gallery" page, which will allow you
    to see all of our featured widget, as long as they’re also configured
    to be Facebook applications.  Finally, we’ve added API support to allow
    developers to write to the "Feeds" system when actions are taken within
    their widgets - this allows the widget to be much more viral in nature,
    if used appropriately.
  • Support for OpenSocial - Although the
    containers that have implemented OpenSocial are still getting their
    bearings straight, we have already implemented an "OpenSocial" bridge,
    which allows developers to create their application once - and the
    widget will be smart enough to know if it’s operating in the context of
    OpenSocial or of Facebook.  This makes development for these networks
    that much simpler and faster, while still leveraging the benefits of
    the networks.
  • SEO Tags - We’ve enabled an administrative
    option for our partners to allow them to input whatever HTML content
    they’d like, which will be copied with the widget via it’s embed code,
    as it moves from one network to the next.  This is a great way to add
    to the branding of the widget, and also allows for an SEO opportunity.
  • Regular
    Expression Blacklisting - Some of our media partners have indicated
    that they have a large number of sites that need to be blacklisted, and
    unfortunately typing all of them in would not be efficient enough.  For
    this reason, we’ve allowed for administrators to disable widgets from
    appearing on sites via regular expressions.
  • Additional MXP
    Support - Initially, our MXP Flash Plugin for development only worked
    on Windows XP.  With this latest release, the new version of the MXP
    will work with Windows Vista and with the Mac OS.  If you’ve tried the
    MXP on those platforms previously, please make sure to try again with
    the latest version.

Of course we managed to sneak in a few bug fixes as well.  As always, let us know what you think in our forums

Lunch 2.0

November 12th, 2007 by yourminis

We
wanted to thank everyone for the awesome turnout at Lunch 2.0 this
week.  We have over 70 people attend in what is shaping up to be a
growing San Diego web community.  Thanks again - lets keep the momentum
going with more and more social events to bring this community together!

A personal thanks to Andrew Warner and Edward O’Connor for
organizing the event.  You can see some of the pics from the event
below…

http://www.lunch20.com/2007/11/08/san-diego-now-has-a-growing-lunch-20-community-too/

Highlights on our latest partner widgets…

November 7th, 2007 by yourminis

It’s been a while since we’ve blogged about some of the widgets that
our partners are creating, so we wanted to take this opportunity to do
just that.

First, MTV has created a widget for their Virtual MTV site.
This widget allows you to take part in the latest happenings, watch
inline video content - and you can switch from one world to another
with the click of a button.

var so = new SWFObject(’http://www.yourminis.com/Dir/GetContainer.api?uri=yourminis/mtv/mini:vmtv6′,’vmtv’,'300′,’250′,’9.0.17.0′,’#f’);so.addVariable(”FlashVars”,”width=300&color=0&uri=yourminis/mtv/mini%3Avmtv6&skinnum=0&height=250&p=1&”);so.addParam(”wmode”,”transparent”);so.addParam(”allowScriptAccess”,”always”);so.useExpressInstall(’http://ct.yourminis.com/swfs/expressinstall.swf’);so.write(’vmtv’);

Next, for some comedy relief, check out the Comedy.com
Daily Jokesters widget.  The widget also plays inline video and allows
you to navigate to your favorite type of humor, in a range of different
categories.

var so = new SWFObject(’http://www.yourminis.com/Dir/GetContainer.api?uri=yourminis/comedy/mini:comedy’,'comedy’,'310′,’260′,’8′,’#f’);so.addVariable(”FlashVars”,”height=250&width=300&xheight=260&xwidth=310&lasturl=&uri=yourminis%2Fcomedy%2Fmini%3Acomedy&”);so.addParam(”wmode”,”transparent”);so.addParam(”allowScriptAccess”,”always”);so.useExpressInstall(’http://ct.yourminis.com/swfs/expressinstall.swf’);so.write(’comedy’);

Make sure to check out the Film.com
widget that brings you everything you need to know about movies and all
things entertainment.  The widget will cycle through the latest movies,
the top 5, reviews and general movie news.

var so = new SWFObject(’http://www.yourminis.com/Dir/GetContainer.api?uri=yourminis/real/mini:film’,'film’,'300′,’250′,’9.0.17.0′,’#f’);so.addVariable(”FlashVars”,”width=300&height=250&sbview=0&color=0&uri=yourminis/real/mini%3Afilm&”);so.addParam(”wmode”,”transparent”);so.addParam(”allowScriptAccess”,”always”);so.useExpressInstall(’http://ct.yourminis.com/swfs/expressinstall.swf’);so.write(’film’);

And if you’re into reality TV, this Survivor widget from CBS is critical.

var so = new SWFObject(’http://www.yourminis.com/Dir/GetContainer.api?uri=yourminis/CBS/mini:survivor’,’survivor’,'300′,’400′,’9.0.17.0′,’#f’);so.addVariable(”FlashVars”,”width=300&height=400&color=0&uri=yourminis/CBS/mini%3Asurvivor&”);so.addParam(”wmode”,”transparent”);so.addParam(”allowScriptAccess”,”always”);so.useExpressInstall(’http://ct.yourminis.com/swfs/expressinstall.swf’);so.write(’survivor’);

Now that baseball season is over, make sure to track your Football teams with this widget from Fantasy Control.

var so = new SWFObject(’http://www.yourminis.com/Dir/GetContainer.api?uri=yourminis/fantasycontrol/mini:fantasyfootball’,'ffootball’,'385′,’370′,’9.0.17.0′,’#f’);so.addVariable(”FlashVars”,”width=385&fullView=1&height=370&color=1509376&uri=yourminis/fantasycontrol/mini%3Afantasyfootball&”);so.addParam(”wmode”,”transparent”);so.addParam(”allowScriptAccess”,”always”);so.useExpressInstall(’http://ct.yourminis.com/swfs/expressinstall.swf’);so.write(’ffootball’);

Finally, check out the AOL MovieFone widget for the upcoming movies, items playing in theaters, showtimes and more.

var so = new SWFObject(’http://www.yourminis.com/Dir/GetContainer.api?uri=yourminis/AOL/mini:moviefone’,'moviefone’,'300′,’250′,’9.0.17.0′,’#f’);so.addVariable(”FlashVars”,”width=300&height=250&color=13356990&uri=yourminis/AOL/mini%3Amoviefone&”);so.addParam(”wmode”,”transparent”);so.addParam(”allowScriptAccess”,”always”);so.useExpressInstall(’http://ct.yourminis.com/swfs/expressinstall.swf’);so.write(’moviefone’);

Enjoy!

Sub Account Administration

October 29th, 2007 by yourminis

As we
continue to bring on large media companies as partners, we’ve noticed
that there’s a tendency for more than one department within the
organization to build widgets on our platform.  Generally, someone is
authorized to view all of the data for all of the widgets that the
company builds, but there are others that should only have access to
their specific widgets.  For this reason, we’ve added the notion of sub
administrators to our dashboard.  The main administrator can now assign
very granular permissions, either on an individual or group basis.  We
think this will be a very useful feature of the platform going forward.

Also,
as an added bonus, we’ve enabled support for our widgets within the
Opera browser.  If you browse our gallery while using Opera, you’ll see
the toolbar change to a "widget" icon:

opera

If
you click on that blue widget icon, you’ll be able to download that
widget and have it live within Opera, even when your on sites other
than yourminis.com.  Pretty cool stuff.

As always, please let us know your thoughts and comments in our forums.  More good stuff is on the way…

Desktop Widgets are back - and better than before!

October 12th, 2007 by yourminis

On October 1st, Adobe released Beta 2 of their AIR product.  Just last night, we performed an update which allows any of our AS3 widgets to be run on the desktop via Adobe AIR.

We’ve made it super simple to get the AIR product.  Just click on the "copy me" on any of our AS3 widgets, and then choose the "AIR" option.  If AIR isn’t running on your machine, we’ll prompt you to either start it or to install the product.  Once you’ve installed AIR, you should be able to download any of our AS3 widgets, essentially with one click.

We’ve embedded one of our AS3 widgets below for those of you that want to try running them on your desktop:

For more widgets please visit www.yourminis.com

Also, for those of you that just want to install AIR and our widget manager without downloading a particular widget, just click the "Install Now" link below:

Give it a shot and as always, let us know your thoughts…

Lunch 2.0 is coming to San Diego!

October 3rd, 2007 by yourminis

Host: goowy.com

When: Wednesday, November, 12:05 - 2:00 PM

RSVP: RSVP here

This will be the first Lunch 2.0 in San Diego, so please help us get established by:

Organizing - If you want to be a part of bringing Lunch 2.0 to LA, email me: mail(at)awarner.com

Coming - If you’re in San Diego, join us for lunch at goowy.

Inviting others - If you’re not in SD, but know people who are, please send them this post.

goowy offers 2 products, yourminis.com, a widget platform that simplifies widget creation, distribution, and discovery and the goowy webtop,
a set of robust productivity tools including email, contacts, calendar,
IM, file storage, and more. (And it’s a great company that keeps
supporting the tech community. Thanks guys!)

Upcoming Lunch 2.0s::

  • Tuesday, October 9- H2.0 ZendCon, Burlingame, San Francisco
  • Friday, October 12- Widemille, Seattle
  • Friday, October 12- YellowBot, Burbank, Los Angeles
  • Friday, October 12- Tagged / Netvibes, San Francisco
  • Tuesday, October 16- The Ladders, New York City
  • Wednesday, October 17- Lunch 2.0 D.C., Washington, D.C.
  • Friday, October 19- TBA, Redwood City, Silicon Valley
  • Monday, October 22- Oracle, Redwood City, Silicon Valley
  • Friday, November 2 - TBA, Los Angeles
  • Wednesday, November 7 - goowy, San Diego
  • Friday, November 9 TBA, Kirkland, Seattle
  • Friday, November 16 - TBA, Los Angeles
  • December TBA, Waterfront, Seattle
  • Friday, December 7 - TBA, Los Angeles
  • Wednesday, December 12 TBA, Palo Alto, Silicon Valley
  • Friday, January 18 TBA, Seattle

Check Out Our Heat Maps - And Other Enhancements for Widget Owners

September 21st, 2007 by yourminis

Our
latest release includes a number of great improvements, including
reporting enhancements, tighter Facebook integration and more.  The
specifics of the release are:

Reporting

  • Click
    Reports - We’ve always tracked URL clicks within the widgets, but we’ve
    now begun to track ALL clicks within the widget.  This allows us to
    create a number of interesting reports.  Perhaps the most interesting
    of these new reports is our Heat Map Report.  This report pulls up a
    visual representation of your widget, with an actual Heat Map
    indicating where users are clicking.  This gives you an incredibly
    different perspective on how your widget is being utilized out in the
    world.  A sample heat map is shown below:
    image
  • Custom
    Tracking Reports - We have exposed API calls which allow a widget
    developer to completely track all clicks within a widget with a path.
    The end result is a text based view into what users are clicking on,
    which can be broken down by our usual parameters (geography, user,
    domain, etc.).
  • CSV Export - We’ve added the ability for users
    to export the data in any of the reports, making those reports
    available outside of our system.  To use this functionality, simply
    pull up a report that you’re interested in, as you usually would, and
    once you’re happy with the parameters of the report, simply click the
    "Export" link at the top of the report.  This will initiate a download
    of the data points to your local machine.

Facebook

We’ve
added better support for Facebook applications.  When users add your
Facebook application widgets, they will be prompted to notify their
friends about the application - this will help in spreading your
widget.  Once a user adds the widget to their profile, they can change
the settings of the widget just as they can in our gallery.  Changes to
search criteria, color, etc. will automatically be saved for the next
time they initiate an interaction with the widget.  We’ve also made
some tweaks related to how we handle the image representation of the
widget - it should look significantly cleaner now.

In addition,
we’ve added one often requested feature - custom email templates.  This
allows you to enter in custom HTML code which is used to send out the
"invite a friend" message.  And we’ve also done our usual amount of bug
fixes and smaller enhancements.  Let us know what you think!

Major Platform Update…

September 5th, 2007 by yourminis

Late
last week we release the yourminis widget API (wAPI), an Actionscript
3.0 Library that allows flash content owners to quickly and easily
create engaging widgets that run on both the web and desktop.  We
developed the wAPI from the ground up with information collected from
our development community to improve the development and overall widget
experience.  Some of the additional benefits include:

  • Simple Widget Publishing – The latest API
    allows content owners to publish their existing Actionscript 3.0
    widgets/apps and take advantage of a majority of the syndication and
    reporting features with absolutely no code changes.  Our previous
    release required that users download our SDK and make code changes
    before publishing to yourminis.
  • Online API Reference – Our latest wAPI
    Reference is now available online from our developer at
    http://www.yourminis.com/developers/docs/as3/index.html .  The wAPI
    Reference docs outline all the packages, classes, methods, events, and
    properties of the object-oriented, actionscript 3.0 widget API
    library.  The docs are generated from our wAPI source and include
    sample code snippets throughtout.  Additionally, the online tutorials
    reference the docs with links directly to the API being referenced
    making learning the yourminis widget API that much easier.
  • Dynamic API Binding – All widgets developed
    using the yourminis wAPI Actionscript 3.0 library no longer statically
    link to the API classes.  This provides the ability to develop on the
    wAPI without any downloads, using any text/actionscript editor, on any
    platform.  We do encourage users to download our SDK which includes an
    .mxp Flash CSE Extension specifically built to make the widget
    development process easier.
  • Event Listeners – The wAPI leverages
    Actionscript 3.0 EventListener class to dispatchEvents to listening
    objects.  This allows developers to write more advanced widgets that
    may have multiple listeners and a complex object hierarchy than was
    previously possible with the previous yourminis Actionscript 2 widget
    API.
  • Object-Oriented Improvements – We have further
    broken the main widget functions into separate classes.  This helps
    make the code easier to understand and to write.  As well, classes such
    as the HTTPLoader and RSSLoader extend and incorporate existing flash
    classes and methods making it easier to transition from existing code.
    For example, calling widget.navigateToURL instead of flash’s
    navigateToURL will add both URL click tracking to your widget and
    myspace click support.  If you have code that handles RSSParsing based
    on a URLLoader, you can use the same code while utilizing the RSSLoader
    in place of the URLLoader (RSSLoader extends URLLoader)

In addition to the aforementioned widget benefits, developers get
all of the innate advantages of using Actionscript 3.0 including (for
an overview, check out
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/actionscript3_overview.html)

  • Faster processing - “ActionScript 3.0
    introduces a new highly optimized ActionScript Virtual Machine, AVM2,
    which dramatically exceeds the performance possible with AVM1. As a
    result, ActionScript 3.0 code executes up to 10 times faster than
    legacy ActionScript code.”
  • ECMAScript for XML (E4X) – “E4X offers a
    natural, fluent set of language constructs for manipulating XML. Unlike
    traditional XML parsing APIs, E4X makes XML feel like a native data
    type of the language. E4X streamlines the development of applications
    that manipulate XML by drastically reducing the amount of code needed.”
  • Regular Expressions – “ActionScript 3.0
    includes native support for regular expressions so you can quickly
    search for and manipulate strings. ActionScript 3.0 implements the
    regular expressions defined in the ECMAScript Language Specification
    (ECMA-262).”
  • Type safety – “In ActionScript 2.0, type
    annotations were primarily an aid for developers; at runtime, all
    values were dynamically typed.  In ActionScript 3.0, type information
    is preserved at runtime and utilized for a number of purposes. Flash
    Player performs runtime type checking, improving the system’s type
    safety. Type information is also used to represent variables in native
    machine representations, improving performance and reducing memory
    usage.”
  • Run-time exceptions – “In ActionScript 2.0,
    many runtime errors would fail in a graceful but silent fashion. This
    ensured that Flash Player would not display some inexplicable dialog
    box, which JavaScript did in early web browsers. On the other hand,
    this lack of error reporting made it more challenging to debug
    ActionScript programs.   ActionScript 3.0 introduces a variety of
    runtime exceptions for common error conditions, improving the debugging
    experience and enabling applications that handle errors robustly.
    Runtime errors can provide stack traces annotated with source file and
    line number information, helping to pinpoint errors quickly.”

Last but not least, widgets within the yourminis platform continue to take advantage of benefits including:

  • Automatic Copying - of your widget to the top
    startpages, blogging platforms, social networks, and desktop widget
    platforms, along with inline email sharing
  • Tracking - of views, time spent, users,
    geolocation, interactions, URL clicks, copies, and custom actions for
    your widget with detailed reporting.
  • HTTP/RSS - Proxying, caching, authorization,
    conversion of RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, ATOM 0.3, and ATOM 1.0 to RSS 2.0 of
    3rd party data feeds (without the need for crossdomain.xml)
  • Management Dashboard - for updating content, widget configurations, blacklisting, syndication destinations, and 3rd party gallery publishing
  • Global caching network  - for faster widget downloads…

Look for added enhancements to our platform over the coming weeks….

MTV’s VMA Widget

September 5th, 2007 by yourminis

We’ve
been quiet for a bit, working on a pretty major release.  We’ll have
more info on that later in the day, but in the meantime, we wanted to
introduce everyone to our latest widget, MTV’s VMA Widget:


MTV 2007 VMA

Get your own text up on the marquee by clicking "MAKE YOUR OWN", type in the text you want, and then click "COPY THIS WIDGET"!