Continuing our fine upstanding history of shining a light on folks doing cool stuff with our stuff, all ye folks with an iPhone can add a bunch more applets to your all too touchable doo-dad via the folks at Blue Flavor.
These handy tools add Yahoo! search, Flickr, Upcoming, del.icio.us and a bunch of other stuff Uncle Steve left off.
Pretty nice way to make your new pocket pal even more useful.
The Search Suggest feature, which provides a list of guesses at what you might be trying to type in that input field, has been making its way around for a little while to various Yahoo! services, notably AllTheWeb LiveSearch and the Yahoo! Firefox 2 searchbox. But it's finally made the jump to the big time, debuting last week on the Yahoo! home page. It's fast, clean, and works basically just how you'd expect.
If you type part of a long query that you're not sure how to spell, it'll finish it off for you:
It even completes from the middle of phrases:
It's not a new feature -- lots of people have been playing around with this idea for a while -- but it's definitely no small feat to get it working so smoothly on one of the most highly trafficked sites on the Web. Try it out! Or don't try it out, by clicking that Disable link.
Ah, friday the 13th. A day when I desperately try to avoid breaking things. Granted, my luck seems to involve breaking things by just touching them, which makes using keyboards a bit difficult. Fortunately, I don't need a keyboard to type this.
I'm using my mind.
Speaking of using your head, the My Yahoo! Folks are spotlighting some of their favorite modules, including a really cool flickr module. Go check it out.
Sorry that this post isn't longer, but I'm getting a headache from hammering my mind onto my keyboard, and I think I've embedded the backspace key into my left eyebrow.
(Thank you Sean for covering for me yesterday. The time stamp on this should give you a bit of an idea how swamped I was...)
Over on the Y!Developer Network Blog, Site optimization genius and all around smart guy Steve Souders has been posting rules on how to make High Performance web sites. Let me point out that good Mr. Souders is one of the architects of choice here at Yahoo! and has a long history of putting together pages that get hit thousands of times a second without cracking a sweat or causing a server to catch fire. He knows from whence he speaks, and the fact that he's happily sharing his vast accumulated knowledge speaks wonders of the guy.
Even if you have a small website running on an older machine, there's a lot of simple steps you can take to really make your pages fast and nimble. Simple things like putting your CSS definitions at the top of the page, but your javascript at the bottom make a huge difference to your customers.
Go on, spend a few minutes to save yourself a lot of headaches.
Me? Well, now that one rather annoying bug has been put to bed, I'm off as well. Just in time to get up in four hours. whee.
While I was messing around with Yahoo! Avatars yesterday, I noticed that we now have a beta Search function for avatar items. When Avatars first started out, it wasn't too much of a problem to scroll through 4 or 5 pages of shirts to find the one that suited you best, but now that we're looking at something more like 41 pages of backgrounds, it gets to be a bit more time consuming. So the introduction of Search is really handy. Search for "beach", refine the search to only supply Backgrounds, and hey, let your avatar enjoy some vacation.
My current avatar is...wow. Well, it's a bit busy. Lots of stuff going on. The octopus floats in the full version.
I'm sure you could come up with something better. Why don't you? The Avatar Makeover Messenger Plugin lets you load up your friends' avatars, change all the terrible things about them floating octopus, and send over the new look for them to accept if they like what you've done -- and how could they not? It's surprisingly fun and works really well within the Messenger plugin framework, if a bit slowly. Just don't take off my visored helmet plus sunglasses combination; my avatar has an eye condition.
"An eye condition? How does he look?"
"Terrible."
That joke would work a lot better if we had smellatars.
Over the weekend, I got a new phone. (No, not an iPhone. That failed the wife/budget test.) As part of that, I wanted to get a copy of my current Yahoo! Address Book onto it.
I went to the import/export page and noticed two new buttons, both for vCard support.
Sure enough, it's also supported in import (as the combined, single vCard file) should you want to go the other way and load your vCards back in. Pretty darn spiffy if you want to load up into the new version of Outlook, your iPod (or other Mac based device, just use the multi-card zip file), Palm or any other vCard ready service you might want to use.
For a little while, we've had a cool parallel mapping project going on in the form of the Yahoo! India Maps. Once you get past the slightly sluggish tile loading (because those bytes are traveling across an entire ocean! Or maybe a few continents, whatever), they're really fun to play with, especially because they're always testing out nifty new features.
The one that caught my eye recently is the Share button, located at the upper left of the map. When you click on it, it pops a bounding box into the page that you can move around and resize. Once you've framed an area of the map that you like, you can either download that section as an image or get code (or a URL) for showing it directly from our servers, as you can see below. This seems like a really handy tool if you need to spice up the location information for your place of business on your webpage or if you just like to save pictures of things to your hard drive. And if they could make this ridiculously intuitive interface generate code that shows a dynamic Javascript map instead of just an image...oooh, it gives me chills. Nice job, India Maps team!
As you may or may not have heard, Y!Go is (supposedly) hit General Availability, meaning that if you have a phone that can run it, you can... uhm... run it.
I'll also toss in that a lot of folks who've used it really like it. I have no idea how good it is, personally, since I don't have a phone that is supported. It reportedly has maps and local business listings, but also traffic, full y!mail integration (with MS Office document attachment handling), flickr support and I think it even does your laundry, but I'm not sure about that last one. There's a what's new document (PDF) that lists out what all you lucky stiffs who can run this can do with it.
Which, of course, doesn't include me.
Sorry if I sound a bit snarky about this, because it's not directed at the fine Y!Mobile folks. My problems are definitely related to the fact that my current carrier has decided to lock down a whole host of features that should normally be open to 3rd party apps like Y!Go (seriously, I can't even send a photo from my phone without ponying up a surcharge, and the built in GPS? Guess what else I get to pay to use?)
So, if you've got one of the lucky phones that are actually useful, g'wan and try it out. It won't cost you a dime.
Unlike me.
Who's seriously thinking about getting a new phone.
I swear that I'll stop writing about Yahoo! Facebook applications when we stop making cool ones. The latest in this illustrious line is the Yahoo! Music Videos application, which is just really darn awesome. Just the fact that it gives you access to music videos for all of the favorite artists that you list in your profile is great, but you also get:
It's just a really nice application altogether and super useful for people who like music videos. And people like it, they really like it! Hopefully you will, too.
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