Rey Bango of Ajaxian (and Microsoft) visited Yahoo! last week, and he has posted his interview of YUI core team members Adam Moore, Satyen Desai, and Luke Smith. Check it out on his blog or in the embed below.
Some of you may have noticed a few changes to our homepage recently as we've recently started testing new versions of our site that highlight our focus on Q&A. As part of the test we are more prominently featuring the Question of the Day and three popular questions. The promotional units we introduced in January have proven popular with partners such as Autism Speaks, Avatar, Best Buy, Chili's, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure and so we created a 300x250 ad unit that will allow for larger and more interactive advertisements for our users without diminishing their experience. You'll also notice some other changes including a new background hue that you can customize by installing one of the themes from the gallery. In the header we have added links to our Web, Images, and Videos services. As we mentioned in November, we are focused on providing the best question answering service available; the new design will allow us more flexibility to offer new features that we are hard at work on and hope to share more information about in the near future. If you haven't yet seen the changes don't worry, you will soon. Let us know what you think of the new design and stay tuned for more to come!
Tony Gentile
SVP, Product
Some of you may have noticed a few changes to our homepage recently as we've recently started testing new versions of our site that highlight our focus on Q&A. As part of the test we are more prominently featuring the Question of the Day and three popular questions. The promotional units we introduced in January have proven popular with partners such as Autism Speaks, Avatar, Best Buy, Chili's, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure and so we created a 300x250 ad unit that will allow for larger and more interactive advertisements for our users without diminishing their experience. You'll also notice some other changes including a new background hue that you can customize by installing one of the themes from the gallery. In the header we have added links to our Web, Images, and Videos services. As we mentioned in November, we are focused on providing the best question answering service available; the new design will allow us more flexibility to offer new features that we are hard at work on and hope to share more information about in the near future. If you haven't yet seen the changes don't worry, you will soon. Let us know what you think of the new design and stay tuned for more to come!
Tony Gentile
SVP, Product
Robert Cooper gave a great lightning talk at our recent Atlanta GTUG meetup, where he discussed using a single codebase to target multiple mediums (e.g. Android, Facebook, Wave, etc.). This post was taken from his original post, which is a good read, providing sound pointers as to how you can maximize audience reach with minimal code changes.
Robert's original post
I love crossword puzzles.
In the time before time, I would stop at my local coffee shop and purchase a copy of the New York Times. I would flip to the crossword and with the classic "double fold" begin the crossword puzzle. Mobile devices soon took over the world, and subscribing to the electronic version soon made much more sense than killing all those trees. Last fall, I switched from the orchards of Cupertino to an Android device, alas, there was no good way for me to do the New York Times puzzle on my way to work anymore. Time to start a project.
I developed the original version of Shortyz for Android (named in honor of, and with apologies to, Will Shortyz of the NYT) in about three weekends. It had a number of usability issues and was rough around the edges, but it was "Good Enough for Me." Unfortunately, because of stolen laptop I lost some progress on the source and my market signing key (yeah, I know). So I decided to "do it right." Forgoing the Android classes I implemented my own two-dimensional scrolling, touch handling and rendering code. Now I am quite happy with the results.
The new Shortyz code was much cleaner. I had implemented a Playboard class as the Controller of my MVC application and was completely independent of the UI code. I moved my IO classes out of the same package as my
Model classes, created a .gwt.xml file, and like that, I had the core of a GWT application. Implement a new UI and I am good to go.
Starting with my Android code, I had a playable web application in about five hours. Not bad, but like the first version of the Android code, I had some annoying usability issues and it was a little sluggish. After another day of work, I changed the UI code from using a play->render cycle like the Android app to use a more traditional MVC data binding system (based on Gwittir), and the performance problems were mitigated.
The next step was to take the web app and make it work everywhere! This is where Gin, a Google Guice DI for GWT apps, was key. My initial web app used a client side persistence mechanism to store play data (HTML5 LocalStorage, Gears, DOM Persistence, Flash). This works great for a standalone web app or a gadget, but for a Facebook version or Wave, I need alternative strategies. For my iGoogle version and Wave, I also need to make requests through the gadget.io API. Gin and Guice made this a breeze. Each of my versions simply becomes a new EntryPoint (or Gadget) class, a new Injector, and a new Module definition.
The real challenge came developing the Wave version. While Apache Shindig makes doing local development of Gadgets easy, there isn't an equivalent local harness for Wave gadgets, so you end up having to do a full build and deploy cycle to work on it. There are also some things that aren't clear from the Wave API docs that creep up, such as the maximum size allowed for the State object. After a solid 40 hours of work, though, I had a co-op play Wave gadget with player colors, remote cursors and nice playback support on the Wave.
So what is the take away here? "Extreme Source Compatibility" is a real thing. This is a Java application running on "Everything But The Java Platform" with the bulk of the code easily reused. Each subsequent version of the app took only a few hundred lines of code to get running. There are some important things to keep in mind. First, making sure your business logic and data models without dependencies on lots of external code is important. Since my Model layer was simple POJOs and my Controller layer pretty much just java.lang and java.util, there was a zero-hour ramp up time to make it work. Cleanly separating this code is also important. Since my input handling code and UI code was cleanly separated, this was much easier than it could have been to do the port. Finally, Guice rocks. While a lot of us in the "enterprisey" world understand the testability advantages of using a DI framework, many rarely have to provide lots of alternate implementations of classes. When you need it, though, it is amazingly handy to have a simple way to re-compose your whole application. Best of all, bugs I fixed in the core library while working on the web version rolled right into the original Android version unmodified.
As an interesting aside: GZipped, the GWT version is about the same size as the Android version; both are less than ~100K for the download. Custom code for each version makes up about 10% of the total LoC, with the exception of the Wave version where it is closer to 25%.
Quick colophon:
Wave for GWT via CoboGWave: http://code.google.com/p/cobogwave/
Gadget Support: http://code.google.com/p/gwt-google-apis/
Gin, Guice for GWT: http://code.google.com/p/google-gin/
Data binding, local storage and JSON serialization: http://code.google.com/p/gwittir/
There’s been a lot of posting about video and video formats on the web recently. This is a good opportunity to talk about Microsoft’s point of view.
The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.
H.264 is an industry standard, with broad and strong hardware support. Because of this standardization, you can easily take what you record on a typical consumer video camera, put it on the web, and have it play in a web browser on any operating system or device with H.264 support (e.g. a PC with Windows 7). Recently, we publicly showed IE9 playing H.264-encoded video from YouTube. You can read about the benefits of hardware acceleration here, or see an example of the benefits at the 26:35 mark here. For all these reasons, we’re focusing our HTML5 video support on H.264.
Other codecs often come up in these discussions. The distinction between the availability of source code and the ownership of the intellectual property in that available source code is critical. Today, intellectual property rights for H.264 are broadly available through a well-defined program managed by MPEG LA. The rights to other codecs are often less clear, as has been described in the press. Of course, developers can rely on the H.264 codec and hardware acceleration support of the underlying operating system, like Windows 7, without paying any additional royalty.
Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based. While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular website without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. We work closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues we know of in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web.
Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer
Several people on the Windows Internet Explorer team have written blog posts about our feedback mechanisms (our use of automated telemetry in Windows, how to write a great bug, how to submit bugs, etc) for IE9. After looking at the many similarities and obvious differences between manual feedback systems and projects, we decided to use Microsoft Connect for IE9 and eliminate the invitation requirement for filing bugs. In this post, I want to take a step back and talk about how we made that decision.
Every Internet Explorer user is a Windows customer. Listening to customer feedback is vital to the success of any business. As communication methods have evolved, how a business listens to its customers has changed as well. Our customers have always been at the center of how we envision and design IE but the way we listen has evolved both with technology improvements and with the way our customers communicate with each other.
Our Internet Explorer 8 beta customers asked us to look at different options for how we listen. We took their feedback to heart and looked deeply into all aspects of our feedback systems as well as those used by other software companies and in other industries. We also looked into research regarding the effectiveness and efficiency of various ways of listening and responding to customers. Most importantly, we listened to real customers, real enterprises, and real developers.
Each time we start a new project we begin by stepping back and looking across the feedback from the previous project and the engineering process by which we collected it. We challenge all assumptions, especially those based on speed, size, or connectivity. We also talk with people to see what they like and dislike about our competitors’ product and engineering process choices to see if Microsoft’s customers might benefit from something similar or more advanced.
One of the assumptions most software organizations appear to take for granted is the need for beta releases. In fact, some companies have even taken this assumption well beyond its commonly understood meaning. So we asked ourselves, “Should we do betas and, if so, how many? Should we do nightly builds? Should we continue to use Microsoft Connect or move to something else?”
A group of us sat down and thought through the customer benefits and drawbacks of various models. Ultimately, there are two main benefits to public releases:
There is a continuum of feedback models that ranges from completely closed to completely open. Examples of completely closed betas include new PC models, cars, toasters, etc. Examples of completely open models include some academic open source projects, school PTA projects, etc. We’ve chosen something near the middle so we can get broad feedback on quality events but not completely anonymous or unstructured either because we believe in responsible engineering.
From our point of view, the most important thing about working on a consumer technology like a browser is respecting people’s scarce time and energy. You can do this while still achieving your goals of getting everybody ready (from web developers to support professionals to corporations) for product launch and getting feedback on quality issues that only surface in unique configurations. I want to call out a few important aspects about feedback systems:
We also looked at various feedback tools when we started the project. These included things like Bugzilla, Mantis, Launchpad, etc. We compared them to Microsoft Connect, which is what nearly every Microsoft product uses to get beta feedback from customers. It turns out that these tools are all amazingly similar.
We looked more deeply at Bugzilla and projects using it because it’s a tool that at least two other browser vendors use today. We looked at the tool itself and how it handles bug workflow both from a beta site perspective and a product engineering perspective. We found some really interesting similarities and differences:
We made some engineering decisions on how to get the best possible feedback from our beta customers after doing all the research into different release cadences, feedback models, tools, and bug management processes. We want to respect our customers’ time and energy so we’re going to distribute more focused Platform Preview builds when there are new platform features ready for people to test drive.
Thanks for all the great feedback in IE8. We’re looking forward to building a great IE9 release!
Jason Upton
Test Manager – Internet Explorer
I wanted to get my feet wet with the finalized widget infrastructure presented in YUI 3.1.0, and I’ve always felt the best way to do that is to write some code. I wanted something easy, and I found that in a CSS ratings implementation I found on Komodo Media. The resulting widget is the YUI3 Ratings Widget (demo). The bulk of the work of the widget is handled by CSS and is described well in the Komodo Media article. The only trouble with that widget, was once a rating was chosen, nothing really happened unless the page was reloaded, and when the widget lost focus, it lost its rating. This is where the YUI 3 Gallery Ratings widget comes in.
My goals for the project were:
It is easy to add the ratings widget to your page using the YUI loader:
YUI({
gallery: 'gallery-2010.04.14-19-47'
}).use('gallery-ratings','event', function(Y) {
// Program logic...
});
You’ll also need the image assets and CSS file located located at github or from your own copy of the gallery.
Simply add a node in your source that contains the current rating (any number between 0 – 5) or is empty.
<span id="myWidget">2.5</span>
You can then instantiate the widget with the following code in your sandbox:
var myRating = new Y.Ratings({ srcNode: "#myWidget" });
myRating.render();
I felt that it was important to make this widget easy to customize and so I added some configuration to the constructor. inline when set to true will display the rating inline with text on the page (defaults to false). skin can be set to “small” to decrease the size of the widget ( Example: 
)
On its own, the ratings widget does little more that set up the rating interaction for the user. A little more work needs to be done to actually use the value. I’m leaving that up to the implementer to consider; whether to add a callback to the event fired when the rating changes, or to supply a plugin to the widget to handle it automatically. To get you started, whenever a rating is changed the ratingChange event fires. It is easy to set up an event listener to catch the ratingChange event for all the widgets on the page. In this example, I log the Rating Widget srcNode’s id, the previous rating, and the new rating for any rating widget on the page when the rating changes:
Y.on("ratings:ratingChange",function(e){
var id = e.target.get("contentBox").get("id");
Y.log(id+" New Value: "+e.newVal+" was: "+e.prevVal);
});
| Index | Ad | Destination Url | Error |
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| 1 | Book New York Hotel Deals Research your New York Stay. Deals up to 70% from example.com. www.example.com/NewYork | http://www.example.com/NewYork | |
| 2 | Hotels In New York Book your hotel room online at a lower price via example.com!! www.example.com/NewYork | http://www.example.com/NewYork | Excessive punctuation in description2 |
| 3 | Manhattan Best Hotel Experience the Best of Manhattan For Rates As Low As $239/Night. www.example.com/NewYork | www.example.com/NewYork | Missing schema in destination url. |
| 4 | New York City Hotels Discount Discounted Rooms in New York City. Get Lowest Rates Available Today. www.example.com/NewYork | http://www.example.com/NewYork | |
| 5 | New York City Hotels Stay Smart in New York NY. Free internet & breakfast bar. www.example.com/NewYork | http://www.example.com/NewYork | |
| 6 | 70% Off New York Hostels Why Pay More? From $10 We Guarantee Lowest Prices - From 1 Night www.example.com/NewYork | http://www.example.com/NewYork | |
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| 8 | Budget Lodging in NYC Comfortable, Clean Modern Economy Hotel.Great Downtown Location! www.example.com/NewYork | http://www.example.com/NewYork |
Result[0]: FailureResult.
ApiException.errors has one ApiError
PolicyViolationError @ operations[2].operand.ad.description2
Result[1]: BatchFailureResult, operationIndexInBatch = 1
Result[2]: BatchFailureResult, operationIndexInBatch = 2
Result[3]: FailureResult.
ApiException.errors have 1 ApiError
AdError.URL_NO_SCHEME @ operations[0].operand.ad.url
Result[4]: BatchFailureResult, operationIndexInBatch = 1
Result[5]: BatchFailureResult, operationIndexInBatch = 2
Result[6]: ReturnValueResult, successfully created Ad.
Result[7]: ReturnValueResult, successfully created Ad.
Result[8]: ReturnValueResult, successfully created Ad.
In the last post in our "Bridging the Gap" series, lets explore how advertisers build tailored campaigns to promote their businesses. 
