Webware

SAN FRANCISCO--Phase one came last week, when Yahoo launched its new profiles site. Phase two begins next week, when Web developers can start sinking their teeth into Yahoo's attempt to replace its present static design with one that's customizable, application-rich, socially connected, and woven into other parts of the Internet.

Developers are essential to what the company calls the Yahoo Open Strategy. Yahoo is building the foundation, but it will be the arrival of others' applications that will show whether Yahoo's transformation attempt is fulfilling those hopes.

Ash Patel, head of Yahoo's Audience Products Division

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

"That starts changing Yahoo from a walled garden to the best of the Web," said Ash Patel, executive vice president of Yahoo's Audience Product Division, speaking to reporters at Yahoo's Brickhouse site here Friday. Patel has a heavy burden: in his new role, he's responsible for a major part of Yahoo's attempt to reverse its fortunes amid a rough economy.

If the strategy works, more people will use Yahoo, and they'll use it more deeply. "We should see a lot more time spent and bigger engagement with the front page and mail and My Yahoo," Patel said. "The average Yahoo user who may use two or three things (today) will now start using four or five or six things."

Applications using the Yahoo foundation can run at Yahoo or outside it, and Yahoo will release a software developer kit to help programmers get started.

For example, when a commenter is posting on a publisher's Web site, the publisher could offer the commenter an option to have that activity broadcast on his stream of activity on Yahoo. That would let the commenter share what he's up to with his contacts while exposing the publisher's site to more potential readers.

Another example--indeed, the winner of the Yahoo Open Hack 2008 programming contest augmented Yahoo Mail to present all photos a person has sent or received into photo albums. More photos are shared daily on Yahoo than are uploaded to the company's Flickr photo-sharing site, Patel said, so moves like this could open new windows of activity on Yahoo properties.

New developer tools
Yahoo has opened some developer-oriented projects already, notably BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) for repackaging Yahoo search results, and SearchMonkey for adding new depth and pizzazz to Yahoo's search results, but those were narrower in scope. At some point next week--Yahoo won't promise which day exactly--the more powerful tools will go live at the Yahoo Developer Network.

Neal Sample, Yahoo's chief architect for platforms

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

There are three broad categories of technology that developers will get access to next week. At the base is a social platform that applications can use to draw upon Yahoo users' social connections--as long as users have given permission. While sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace capitalized on the social-networking phenomenon, Yahoo argues that it already has the social data built into its properties. It's now a matter of bringing it to the fore so applications and users can draw on that information.

"The idea is to create a single social experience that can be shared," said Jay Rossiter, head of the Yahoo Open Strategy.

One oft-cited example is a revamped Yahoo Mail that spotlights mail from people's close contacts. If you spend a lot of time e-mailing your boyfriend, mom, or college roommate, chances are you'll want to know when they e-mail back.

One level above the social plumbing is the foundation for running applications, called the Yahoo Application Platform. Initially, Yahoo will house standalone applications, but as third parties' products mature, they'll also be able to run on Yahoo users' profile pages, My Yahoo pages, and other locations. Some will even run on the Yahoo.com home page, as long as they can meet tough requirements for high performance.

This diagram shows various components developers can use to work with the Yahoo Open Strategy.

(Credit: Yahoo)

And the third level is the services level. Here, Yahoo provides the Yahoo Query Language, a close relative to the Structured Query Language many use to extract data from databases. YQL is designed to make it easier for programmers to extract and process data from Yahoo and many other Web sites, and Yahoo says it'll do the heavy lifting to make the data workable through YQL.

Overshare?
Of course, users might get the willies thinking about just how much their own activity is becoming part of the information flow of the Internet. Do you really want an application sharing what you do with your friends or indeed the entire world?

Yahoo doesn't want any privacy surprises, though. Each new application must declare to the user exactly what Yahoo services it wants to use and must obtain the users' permission to do so through a "scary" warning screen: the more services, the more exclamation mark alerts are shown--an interface designed to encourage developers to use the bare minimum and to ensure that users know what they're getting into, said Neal Sample, Yahoo's chief architect for platforms.

"Yahoo's going to put up essentially another skull and crossbones" for each service the application uses, Sample said.

And users will have fine control over what's shared or not. People will be able to broadcast what music they're listening to publicly while confining their movie habits only to close friends, for example.

Some socially connected services will require signed-in participation from both a Yahoo user and outsiders. For example, a person could selectively share photos without making them public, and those viewing the photos would have to sign in. Today, such a move requires that all people be Yahoo members, but the company will add a fast, lightweight registration process that can use any e-mail address.

Yahoo, of course, hopes receiving invitations from Yahoo members effectively will upsell those outsiders to Yahoo services. "It's valuable for Yahoo to have a way to draw more users into Yahoo," Rossiter said.

When Apple announced the iPhone apps store several months ago, it appeared to signal the end for the popular homebrew Installer.app by Nullriver. While the application has a few developer creations that cost money to use, most of the library is completely free, letting people load up on useful applications without spending a dime. The application became so popular it started coming with popular unlock and jailbreak utilities, including ZiPhone, which has had more than 3 million downloads of its latest version.

Apple's new system is a different story. It doesn't cost anything, but developers must go through the company's QA for approval and inclusion. Developers can also charge users to use their applications at the point or purchase instead of relying on time or feature restrictions post-download. There's also the SDK, which makes it viable for companies to spin out entirely new development teams to port over versions of their Web apps or software that are specially tuned for the device.

The obvious guess here is that the Installer.app will simply go the way of the dinosaurs because of Apple's own first party creation, but I think the groundbreaking tool has life left in it yet. Nothing besides the apps store says people will no longer want to jailbreak their phones. The new marketplace sure looks nice, but it's not going to have everything people want. There will be all manner of apps that don't make the cut and the developers that built them will want to hawk them somewhere else.

Another thing to take into account is one of the important things not included in Apple's latest software--customization.

One of the early killer apps for the iPhone was Summerboard, a simple tool that would completely re-skin the look and feel of your phone. No such application is likely to make its way to the app store, since no app made through the SDK can have that level of control. The same goes for potential VoIP apps that can be integrated at a very deep level into the device's calling software.

There's still a huge market for these things, whether Apple is willing to allow it or not. I'm not surprised the company has passed on the potential cash cow. Nokia practically built an empire in the 1990s by selling phones with interchangable faceplates, but ultimately the ratio of quality to crap from third-party creators was off the charts. That stigma still exists for some users, which is why it's likely Apple passed on adding a user replaceable battery if only to limit the offshoot of companies that would likely create glitter, and clear plastic replacements.

What it comes down to this time around is readiness. A cheaper price point means more people are likely to want and actually afford the device. The new architecture also means those same hordes of people will be open to having non-Apple applications on their phone. While I have no doubt Apple will easily pull in huge numbers from paid apps in the coming months, Installer.app might have a few surprises up its sleeves.

Update: I incorrectly referred to Nullriver as Nullsoft--makers of WinAmp. That has since been fixed.

What caveats will the new push-notification service come with?

(Credit: James Martin/CNET News.com)

One of the finer points worth digging deeper into from Monday morning's Apple news out of the WWDC is the company's new workaround to notifications from third-party apps in the latest iPhone system software.

Traditionally, when an application is running on a mobile device it will alert the user in real time when there's been a change or something needs their attention. With Apple's SDK (past, present, and immediate future), developer-made apps cannot run in the background, and therefore cannot ping for data unless you're running them explicitly.

The solution Apple announced Monday is a bit of a compromise, ferrying notifications through Apple's servers instead of locally on the user's hardware. Any messages from developer apps get piped into user's phones in one of three different types of notifications--counters badges (for something like a new e-mail message), audio cues, and pop-up messages that look similar to text alerts.

For the better part of a year, users with jailbroken iPhones have been enjoying apps that run the traditional way (in the background), even when the device is in sleep mode. Jailbroken apps like Mobile Chat and Intelliborn's Intelliscreen (hands-on) run quietly, pulling in data every few minutes and popping up with a message the way Apple's own apps behave. The problem is that this model doesn't scale. When you've got dozens of apps pinging for data every few minutes your battery runs out of juice fast. Worse yet, it puts nearly all of the control to three other parties: the users, developers, and carriers.

While Apple's big sell Monday was "better battery life" (see picture above), my guess is that the company realized this would be a great time to get a handle on all the potentially great marketing data that leaves the second an app is downloaded from the new App Store.

Why not find out which apps are getting the most use and offering the developers special licensing deals? Better yet, why not sell that information to third parties like advertisers to help them work with highly used apps to sell ad units or sponsorships while getting an additional cut? This new tunnel for data is a veritable gold mine that's not just metrics--it's attached to user IDs and billing information too.

Apple must be anticipating that users will be adding in excess of 10 or more apps. In fact, I'm sure it's banking on users doing so if only to get the revenue stream flowing. The real question is whether or not that data will be used just to provide the advertised 300 hours of standby or to sell to third parties and vet new developer talent without doing all the legwork.

Eugene Berman's plug-in lets Lightroom users export photos directly to iStockphoto.

(Credit: Eugene Berman)

Photographer and programmer Eugene Berman has released version 1.0 of a Lightroom plug-in that enables photographers to export pictures directly to iStockphoto, a "microstock" Web site that sells images for relatively low cost.

Adobe Systems' Lightroom is gaining in popularity as a way to edit and catalog the unprocessed "raw" images from higher-end digital cameras, and Adobe in 2007 released a beta version of a software developer kit (SDK) that lets anyone write plug-ins for exporting photos.

Other Lightroom plug-ins also exist that permit uploads to Flickr, Picasa, Zenfolio, and SmugMug.

Exporting to iStockphoto is a different matter, though. Photographers might be more inclined to take their shots on a trip through Photoshop for more careful noise reduction, edge sharpening, or selective editing not possible in Lightroom.

The plug-in provides the ability to enter keywords, upload multiple photos, and include model releases, Berman said.

However, Lightroom expert Sean McCormack rightly gripes that it would be improved if it exported the photo's title from the metadata title field rather than the filename, which is more likely to be something obscure such as DSC7893.jpg.

(Via Lightroom News.)

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is taking its first look at the world beyond its own photo-editing boundaries, and stock-art photographers are among those who stand to benefit.

A view of the Flickr export tool in the Lightroom developer kit.

(Credit: Adobe)

Adobe's software development kit for its Lightroom software, released Thursday evening along with the Lightroom 1.3 update, is only a preview edition with limited abilities, but already one potential use for the software is evident: easier photo uploads to "microstock" photo-sale sites.

The SDK preview involves only image export from Lightroom, but it includes several features for interacting with Web or FTP sites on the Internet.

Uploading photos can be a big hassle for photographers who sell their work via the gaggle of microstock sites such as Dreamstime, iStockphoto, and Fotolia that have cropped up on the Internet. Some microstock photographers shoot exclusively for one site or another, lured by higher payments, while others sell photos at multiple sites. Either way, exporting directly from Lightroom could ease export difficulties.

Of course, it might not be the thing for everyone, including those who want to do further processing for noise reduction and sharpening in Photoshop, for example. But it's a step in the right direction.

Likely to be of nearer-term use is a sample plug-in distributed with the kit that permits uploading photos to Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site. It lets users set a variety of options, including privacy and tags, but doesn't let users deal with Flickr sets used for grouping photos together.

"I'd love to say that we support full-on synchronizing with Flickr sets...but that's not really possible in (Lightroom) 1.3," Lightroom engineer Eric Scouten said on Adobe's Lightroom forum. "I'm a Flickr user myself. I understand the desire and hope to see it happen in a future release."

Those who want to get started writing plug-ins should bone up on the Lua programming language that Adobe selected for plug-ins. And they should refrain from ambitions to reproduce the rich world of Photoshop plug-ins: Adobe expects at least for now to confine plug-ins to "workflow" tasks such as exporting rather than image-editing tasks.

Update: I found a couple extra tidbits on the Lightroom 1.3 update beyond the SDK from Tom Hogarty, the Adobe executive in charge of the software. For one thing, he still recommends against using the Time Machine feature in Apple's Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system with Lightroom. For another, he said there are other reasons to upgrade besides the SDK, new camera support, and some Leopard compatibility fixes. "In addition to fixing the auto-write XMP performance issue there are several other architectural changes under the hood that should make your experience with Lightroom smoother," Hogarty said on his blog.

Google's Android software gives Sun Microsystems' Java technology a starring role--but not the version of Java the rest of the mobile phone industry has been developing since the 1990s.

Instead, Google struck off on its own in an attempt to improve performance and openness for the software used in the Open Handset Alliance phones. That means programmers will have a new variety of Java to reckon with--offset somewhat by Google's $10 million code contest to draw developers in.

One difference is Google's development of its own core Java virtual machine (JVM) technology called Dalvik, the software that actually executes Java programs on an Android phone, which Google says means Java programs run fast even on the constrained hardware of mobile phones. But a more significant departure than just using an in-house JVM is the fact that Android isn't part of the Java Community Process that Sun established in 1999 to oversee the development of new Java features.

The JCP governs Java by codifying new features as application programming interfaces (APIs), so programmers can have a standard way of calling upon new technology such as Bluetooth support or 3D graphics. But that existing Java realm wouldn't accommodate the developer freedoms Google thought were important in Android.

"We wanted the platform to be open in a lot of different ways," said Mike Cleron, a Google senior staff engineer working on Android. "The idea is that anybody can come along and replace the pieces of the Android experience on a very fine-grained level. The existing APIs didn't really allow the level of openness we were hoping to achieve in Android."

It should be noted that Google isn't working in a Java vacuum. For example, one of the OHA partners, Motorola, has helped lead development of Java for mobile devices, and Google wants to keep the Java programming experience familiar to developers. And Google is an executive committee member of the JCP, though only for the Standard and Enterprise editions that run on PCs and servers, not the mobile edition for phones and other devices.

"We have people on the team who are active in the Java community. They've been helpful in informing us and guiding us, making sure what we were doing is familiar to folks in the Java community," said Steve Horowitz, Android's engineering director.

Further fragmented?
But the bigger issue is whether Google's effort will worsen the already fractured world of Java. Not all phones support all the same Java standards, so programmers can't be sure that their software will run on a multiplicity of devices, as the "write once, run anywhere" Java tagline promises.

"They are using Java, but they aren't implementing any well-known Java framework, and really that just creates another standard to support. The risk they take here is that they might fragment the market further," Benoit Schillings, Trolltech chief technology officer, told my comrade Maggie Reardon. Trolltech, which sells tools and components for programmers whose software runs either on PCs or on mobile phones.

Mauro Lollo, CEO of mobile phone video-streaming company Movidity, saw Google's work similarly. "In essence, they've created another standard. Standards are great, but the challenge is that there are so many of them," he said.

Google also faces a common risk of open-source software, that the openness will mean programmers can "fork" projects in different, incompatible directions. (Indeed, this was one of the earlier reasons Sun resisted its eventual decision to make Java open-source software.) "In the end, you could have 20 different versions of the Android technology that are incompatible, because anyone can take the license, modify it, and create another variation," Schillings said.

For its part, Sun supports Java and open-source software on mobile devices, but expessed some caution about joining Google's alliance. "We were interested in being part of the Google ecosystem, but we were interested in getting more clarity on what this program entails," said Rich Green, executive vice president of Sun's software effort.

Asked if there's any possibility of unifying the Android work with the Java Community Process, Horowitz said, "It's an open alliance. We can welcome anybody who wants to join."

Android uptake
Techno-politics aside, Google clearly has grand aspirations for Android. And it wants outsiders to be part of the development.

In stark contrast to Apple, which plans to release a software developer for its iPhone in February, half a year after the product began shipping, Google is releasing its SDK about a year before any Android phones ship.

"We're making it available pretty early--early enough that we can get feedback at a point where we can still impact the direction of the software," Horowitz said. "People tend not to ship SDKs until the products are done. In this case we thought the platform was such an important part that we wanted to get that out early."

Of course, there's another advantage to releasing an SDK early: the open-source community can help build interesting applications that give Android phones more than just the basic set of programs.

So far, so good, said Horowitz, pointing to "unprecedented" interest in Android compared to other projects hosted at Google's open-source projects site, code.google.com. "It is above and beyond anything Google has seen to date," Horowitz said.

A diagram of the inner workings of Google's Android software for mobile phones.

(Credit: Google)

Among details in the SDK:

• It makes mention of support for GSM mobile phone networks, the leading technology for mobile phone networks, but is silent on support for the top rival, Qualcomm's CDMA. That will come, though, Horowitz said, pointing to CDMA allies such as Qualcomm that are members of OHA. "It's clearly something on the roadmap, but we're not talking about specific support for it at this time," he said.

• OHA supports touch-screen technology, but Horowitz declined to comment on support for multitouch, a notable iPhone ability that opens up user-interface possibilities, beyond saying multitouch support isn't in the first version of the Android SDK.

• Google will release a new version of the Android SDK once feedback from programmers starts coming in. "We're committed to a regular release cycle," Horowitz said.

• Software should run quickly on mid-range phone hardware such as those with a 200MHz ARM 9 processor. "One of the key goals of the project was to ensure we can run on a broad range of phones that don't require a high-end processor at all," Horowitz said. "When we bring it to higher-performance devices, it's just going to scream."

• The SDK so far permits development only of software that runs on the Java foundation, not natively on the hardware itself. "We are aware of the interest in native application development, but we having nothing to comment on right now," Horowitz said. But performance shouldn't be an issue: "Our system is designed to take full advantage of native code in performance-critical areas and expose this functionality through our framework APIs."

Marguerite Reardon and Dawn Kawamoto contributed to this report.

Correction: An earlier version of this blog misstated Google's connection to the JCP. Google is a member of the Java Community Process, though not for the Java Mobile Edition version to which the Android software is most closely related.

Update: The directory is now live. CNET News.com's Tom Krazit wrote up a quick look at it. One funny thing to note is that accessing the directory from an iPhone renders like it does on your desktop browser instead of in a finger, and eye-friendly format. Also, using the much-touted double-tap feature to zoom into the lineup of apps doesn't even center the page correctly. Apparently Apple didn't deem it necessary to make their own iPhone-centric page easier to use. Hopefully the early adopter, tech savvy crowd can handle it. Original story follows.

iPhone users still relying on Safari for third-party applications instead of going the unlocked route may be getting a new directory of applications, straight from the source. AppleInsider and 9 to 5 Mac are reporting that Apple is set to launch its own directory of third-party Web applications that have been optimized for the iPhone, similar to the current directory the company has of Mac software, and Dashboard Widgets residing in Apple.com's download section. The news gets even jucier with a misplaced link from one of Apple's official RSS feeds, showing the new section getting its own Apple vanity URL of Apple.com/Webapps (note: the link currently goes nowhere).

Apple Insider also claims that some developers have been contacted by Apple reps to submit all sorts of information about its applications, including screenshots, links, and descriptions. If the directory is anything like Apple's current iteration for software, there will likely be a way for people to submit their own right from the site, as well.

This isn't anywhere closer to the SDK everyone's hoping for, but an official directory would be a welcome addition to the slew of iPhone application directories that have sprung up since the introduction of the phone earlier this year, and open up a potentially larger audience for developers with cool applications. As an iPhone user, my only suggestion would be to take advantage of the capability to update the system software, and integrate the new directory as its own button on the home screen. Better yet, let people "copy" an application shortcut icon to their home screen to let them jump straight to the application like what's been done in the unlocked iPhone community.

No news on when the site is going live. In the meantime, if you're a new iPhone user looking for places to find some optimized Web applications, CNET's got its very own iPhone App directory. I'd also recommend iPhone Application List and EverythingiPhone.