(Credit:
Yahoo)
Yahoo may be having problems running its business and keeping good people, but the company continues to be innovative around the user experience.
CEO Jerry Yang talks about making Yahoo the starting point for the Web and about making Yahoo's pages more open. The latest iteration of the Yahoo front page (above) takes advantage of a new YUI 3, a framework for building user interfaces and will allow users and developers to customize the page.
Here are notes from Yahoo engineer Nicholas C. Zakas about the new framework:
1. Eliminate global dependencies. We wanted each part of the page to operate separately from all of the others. Each part should have no knowledge of what else is on the page and therefore can't depend on objects to be globally available. The 2.x library is based on the global YAHOO object, which we would have had to abstract away; the 3.x concept of YUI instances that could be individually manipulated worked perfectly to achieve this goal.
2. Make it small, make it fast. The Front Page can't afford to be slow, so we needed to have as little code as possible to get everything up and running. YUI 3 impressed us with its organization into small, atomic units that allowed us to specifically include parts of the library that we wanted while eliminating parts that were unnecessary. Further, one of the goals of YUI 3 was to optimize for runtime execution and make it faster than the 2.x version. Once again, YUI 3's approach was directly in line with the Front Page's goals.
3. Create version independence. From the start, we didn't want to have dependencies on specific versions of YUI components as this can lead to maintenance issues. What we really wanted was for each part of the page to be able to use whatever version of the components that they wanted. The sandboxing feature of YUI 3 opened up the possibility of having two (or more) YUI instances each loading different versions of various components while not interfering with each other.
4. Allow code portability. Having worked at Yahoo for a combined five years, Steve and I knew that anything we put on a Yahoo property could be a candidate for porting to someplace else. We knew that this possibility meant the code had to stand on its own and not make assumptions about the environment in which it was placed. We thought about the most difficult environment possible: a locked-down browser environment where the JavaScript code has no direct access to the DOM. Since YUI 3 can abstract away the DOM through its Node interface, we had the entrypoint necessary to make this requirement a reality.
5. Be forward compatible. The project to create a new Front Page is an incredibly long one and we wanted to be as forward-looking as possible. We knew that if we created the framework on YUI 2.x that we'd be hard pressed to get time to upgrade later on. By building on YUI 3 from the start, we eliminated the need for developing an upgrade path later on.
The new front page is in "bucket" testing, which means that random people will see the page, and was first unveiled in September.
YourMinis, the popular single page aggregator service, has launched desktop integration with its library of over 14 million widgets, using Adobe's Apollo technology. After installing the Apollo runtime and the YourMinis Apollo plug-in on your PC or Mac, you can simply click on any widget in the YourMinis library and click "Add to Desktop." Likewise, there's the option to send any widget to the Web if you'd prefer it to stay on one of your YourMinis pages. It's really well-done.
Once they're on your desktop, you can drag them around, change colors, transparency levels, and various settings for each widget--the usual features that come with a full-fledged widget application.
Mac users likely will be uninterested with the new feature, as they've already got a built-in widget engine with OS X's Dashboard. PC users, on the other hand, now have another free way to put widgets on their desktop besides Yahoo Widgets and Google Desktop. As we've mentioned before, Apollo is still pretty early on in development, and the YourMinis widgets are RAM-hungry. With just four open, they were taking up more CPU cycles and memory than Microsoft Word and Outlook combined. It will be interesting to see how Adobe addresses this problem further along in Apollo's development.
See also News.com's take on how Apollo is 'one-upping' Ajax.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
(Credit:
CNET)
The Times Reader renders New York Times articles better than visiting the Times Web site, providing users with the ability to search throughout the document for keywords; cut and paste, then either save or e-mail citations; and to print whatever content you want. Additional advantages with this reader include the ability to choose an article without scrolling and to read and view content while offline. A very cool "What's Read?" feature grays out the individual articles you've already seen. Another nifty feature is the "News in Pictures" slide show, where you can first preview the day's hottest articles in pictures, then drill down to the text via embedded links. There is no capability yet for rendering video feeds within the Times Reader.
(Credit:
CNET)
The Times is currently offering a public beta to registered members of its site. Registration is free, however, be prepared to give your e-mail address, year of birth, and zip code. Ostensibly this is prevent minors from registering without adult consent, and to key specific advertising to your particular region of the country. We recommend reading through the member agreement section before signing up.
A few technical caveats: The Times states the minimum hardware requirements are 1Ghz processor, 384MB of RAM (with 500MB of RAM recommended). This application also requires .Net Framework 3.0 be downloaded onto Windows XP SP2. On our test machine, our Net Framework 3.0 installation caused numerous problems and had to be removed. On our Windows Vista machine, we experienced no problems installing or using the Times Reader.
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