Widgetbox's App Accelerator turns widgets into Facebook apps
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People can make their own Facebook applications, and now Widgetbox users can make them faster with App Accelerator, a new Web-based helper tool. CNET Editor Jessica Dolcourt tested it out with her very own Webware application for Facebook.
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Facebook, a social-networking site that has become an open development platform, announced Thursday that it purchased startup Parakey for an undisclosed amount. The company, started by Mozilla Firefox cofounders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, has been creating products to unify and integrate desktop applications and the Web.
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Facebook will help other social networking sites to run applications developed for its own software platform, it said Thursday.The company already encourages developers to build applications that work with its site, publishing details of the tags and APIs (application programming interfaces) needed to exchange data.Now it plans to license those details for use by other social networking sites and platforms, according to the Facebook Developers blog . The idea is that developers will only have to write their widget or small application once if there is a common platform for structuring how the applications integrate with sites.The initiative runs in parallel with Google&#39;s OpenSocial project, which revolves around creating standard APIs (application programming interfaces) for social networking applications. APIs let applications exchange information and are crucial to building programs that, for example, take information from Facebook profiles and blend it with some new functionality or feature.Facebook already has a taker. On Wednesday, social networking site Bebo said it would use Facebook&#39;s standards for its own Open Application Platform. Bebo isn&#39;t taking sides, however: it will eventually support Google&#39;s OpenSocial too, it said.MySpace, the largest social networking site, has also said it will support OpenSocial.Facebook said its architectural platform is composed in part of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) related tags and methods for building applications.It published details of FBML , its set of tags for formatting data exchanged between applications and users. Some of the tags enable developers to build programs with the same design elements as Facebook&#39;s site, so the application blends in.External developers have created about 7,000 applications since Facebook opened up its site in June. The applications have offered a commercial opportunity for developers, although Facebook has been under fire for how those programs respect users&#39; privacy.Google&#39;s OpenSocial platform got off the ground last month with Plaxo&#39;s Pulse, the first application to use the APIs. Pulse, which aggregates and delivers new information from social networking and other Web sites, is a feature of Plaxo&#39;s Web-based address book service.&#160;
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I&#8217;m not sure if the Google Ajax Search widgets are new or not, as Google has been developing web publisher widgets based upon Google API&#8217;s for a while, but the implementation of such Google Ajax Widgets is getting easier and easier. In the same tradition of Google AdSense&#8217;s Related Links, content supplied by various Google Search [...]
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Picking back up on his blog, Sean Coates shares a Dashboard widget he's created to do quick and dirty PHP interpreting on the fly:   I found myself using php -r on the command line to test some simple code snippets, and it occurred to me that this isn't "The Mac Way." So, following the excellent documentation at Apple, I managed to come up with something pretty useful in an afternoon.   His widget sits happily, ready to take in PHP code and output the result at the click of a button.
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SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 31  /PRNewswire/ -- Widgetbox(TM), (http://www.widgetbox.com/), the leading marketplace for web widgets, now enables blog owners to create a widget version of their blog.
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A new version of WikyBlog was released today with new support for content includes and 304 responses. WikyBlog is a scalable CMS/Groupware application with an AJAX enhanced tabbed interface enabling users to view/edit multiple files within the same page.    Additionally, this release includes a complete Turkish translation, a few database modifications,  a google maps bug fix and sidebar search bug fix.  WikyBlog Home:   http://www.wikyblog.com     Get WikyBlog:   http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wikyblog/WikyBlog-1.3.zip?download     WikyBlog Features:   http://www.wikyblog.com/Help/en/WikyBlog/Features
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By ANICK JESDANUN, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS  NEW YORK  The operators of the online hangout Facebook wanted to help users save time by highlighting changes their friends make to their personal profile pages.
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Facebook wants to make its members' profiles portable, get a handle on software developers, launch ad platform.
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Internet startup Meebo is urging developers to create applications around its Web-based IM (instant-messaging) site, an attempt to create Facebook-like momentum.Using the Meebo site, people can send instant messages using accounts from companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL. The site lets people use their IM account when they may not be at computers with the right IM software installed. People can also embed a Meebo chat window within their Web site.Meebo has started to augment its site with applications and has recently added voice and video chat. Now it&#39;s hoping to lure developers into building applications that will be offered through Meebo&#39;s site, similar to Facebook.Facebook opened its site to external developers&#160;in May and now has at least 6,000 applications, which have drawn more people to the social-networking site. Sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and others want to generate more advertising revenue by taking advantage of the masses of users flocking to social-networking sites. So far, Meebo has no advertising.Developers can build a JavaScript or Flash application and register it with Meebo, which will then release code to allow the new application to call on Meebo&#39;s APIs (application programming interfaces), according to Meebo&#39;s blog.The application then resides in Meebo&#39;s database. When the developer signs into their account, the application will appear in a list contained within Meebo&#39;s IM window. The developer can invite others to try out the application.Eventually, developers can alert Meebo again to review the application. Meebo says it will then contact the developer within a few weeks.&#160;
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Widgets, or small Web applications that supply useful information direct to the desktop, could soon be appearing on your cell phone screen.Japan&#39;s Access, the company behind the NetFront browser that is used in hundreds of phones on sale worldwide, has developed a widget system for the latest version of the browser and will demonstrate it next week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.Much like those on Apple&#39;s Mac OSX or Windows Vista, the NetFront widgets can do things like provide updated weather information, news headlines, favorites from YouTube, local maps, and photo feeds from Web sites.The intention is that users will be able to download widgets for sites like Google Maps, YouTube, and Wikipedia so those sites become services available directly from the desktop. In the case of some sites, say an auction site where prices change all the time, the widget will be able to provide constantly updated information to the desktop so the user doesn&#39;t have to go through a browser to the Web site.The widgets can be kept minimized at the bottom of the screen or placed on the desktop, where they appear as small boxes showing just a few highlights of the information they contain. Click on the boxes and they expand to full screen and their entire contents can be accessed.In a demonstration the minimized weather widget showed a symbol for the sun -- the current weather conditions at the time. When placed on the desktop it added the current conditions, &quot;clear,&quot; and the temperature and when fully expanded a three-day forecast was provided.The news widget displayed just five headlines on the desktop but expanded to show more news and the full text of each story while the video widget on the desktop had a screenshot from a single video and expanded to show details of the video and related content.In addition to linking up with data stored on the network the widgets framework also supports communication with parts of the phone hardware, like the camera, GPS chip or e-mail client.Access has developed the widget framework for NetFront 3.5, the latest version of its browser. The software isn&#39;t in any products available to consumers but is on its way. Access said it has already released NetFront 3.5 to partners and products are coming. It has also had interest on the widgets from partners but wouldn&#39;t identify them.On Monday Access will begin offering a preview of NetFront 3.5 intended for software developers. The software runs on Windows Mobile.The NetFront browser has been fitted in 1,349 different products to date including cell phones, televisions, set-top boxes, and PDAs. On Thursday Access said more than 544 million copies of the browser have been installed on such products.
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On the ProDevTips.com website, there's a new tutorial (part one of a series) that walks the developer through the integration of the Zend Framework, some Ajax functionality and Smarty to create a feed reader.   In this series I will walk you through the code of a site that uses only Ajax and Scriptaculous to handle it's completely windowed interface. Making an interface like this is not really good design, it's only done here for the sake of teaching. It is kinda cool though. Especially if you have a big screen.   The source code is available for download and having it makes the installation and setup of the system much simpler. With it, you're only about fifteen steps away from getting the application up and running.
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Paul Jones has posted a teaser concerning his talks(s) at the upcoming php|works conference this year. One is about organizing your applications to make them easier to maintain and work better and the other is a follow up to some previous benchmarks he created comparing several of the popular PHP frameworks.   About The Benchmarking Talk - Easy one-liner: "Statistical Histories for Fun and Profit." And I do mean profit: the better your apps runs on a given stack, the more eyeballs you get on your ads (or, the more users you can handle).   He will be talking about why benchmarking your app is important, how to benchmark a framework and, the thing everyone's waiting for - his benchmark stats comparing several popular frameworks.   Paul also requests that, if possible, one developer from the teams of each of the other frameworks (besides Solar of course) could be in attendance to critique the talk and help point out issues either with the talk or in his methods.
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To lure more consumers, it will distribute a Zumobi app that makes it easier to access Web sites and widgets.
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Want your readers to see where they fit in among all your site's users? Check out this new widget.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted some information about a screencast of the QEDWiki they've covered previously from IBM.   We've covered QEDWiki before but so far we've only had screenshots to show. Now we've got a full blown screencast. The demo application they show is the "hardware store" scenario we first saw in the article with Dan Gisolfi. Each time I see a new screencast of this application it gets better. This time, the properties panels are fleshed out and everything looks a lot more finished.   They remind readers of what the QEDWiki is - "the most sophisticated applications to have been built on top of the Zend Framework so far" that allows users to create applications in a drag and drop style right on a wiki page. Check out the screencast for a look at how it all works.
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On PHPied.com, Stoyan Stefanov shows how, via a simple bit of code (using some SimpleXML) he replaced the javascript widgets he was previously using for weather information.   So it was time for a change, since those buttons were generated by some javascripts, hosted by theweathernetwork, which is kind of a web 1.0 way of sharing content. In the days of APIs and stuff, this is a shame.   He dropped theweathernetwork.com's information and went for something a little more API-friendly - the weather feeds that Yahoo! offers. Once he figured out the right URL parameter to pass for the cities, it was just a matter of whipping up a 30 line script (using SimpleXML) to grab the weather information for the city and echo out the data.