Welcome!

Sunday January 6th 2008

Today we’re proud to announce the first preview of the Yahoo! Mobile Widget Platform.

Mobile has always been a hard nut for developers to crack. So many different types of devices, operating systems, and capabilities. How do you cover them all?

Here in the Yahoo! Mobile team we’ve dealt with these problems day and night (literally), trying to build a great mobile product for consumers that addresses all these different challenges. During the development of our mobile products, we’ve built an awesome platform and a language that helps us solve a lot of the traditional mobile developer problems. Now we are opening it up for all developers.

This is a huge deal. Anyone will be able to write a Snippet or Widget and deploy it across hundreds of phones, potentially reaching millions of customers you never could before. We take care of the hard part and let you focus on what you do best: content.

The new Blueprint language (currently in preview form) allows developers to start building mobile widgets easily and quickly using straightforward XML. You can also build a simple mobile widget with RSS Instead of Blueprint if you like.

To be fair though, you won’t be writing any first-person shooters or 3D cube effects with this language (at least not yet). Our goal in this first release was breadth, not depth. We wanted to make sure developers could get onto the most devices possible. As we move forward, devices will get more powerful and the baseline will get higher. As this happens we’ll also start to increase our depth.

This stage of our platform and language is just the beginning. We already have our roadmap planned out. While this first release relies on developers to serve their Snippets and Widgets remotely, the next generation will run directly on the device and get at the more powerful features of today’s cool new phones.

Not only do developers benefit from this platform, but so do users. Users are able to customize and personalize their Yahoo! mobile experience with your Widgets. We’re leveling the mobile playing field by giving all developers and publishers equal access to our large audience of Yahoo! mobile users, so the only thing you need to worry about is building a mobile widget users will want to keep on their device.

In the coming months we’ll be releasing many more exciting tools for developers to create even more powerful and innovative mobile widgets. This blog will be the go-to place to learn about new developments as well as tips and tricks on how to build Snippets and Widgets.

We will also be establishing a forum to allow you to connect with other developers using the platform, as well as some of the engineers that created it.

We will soon open up the floodgates to allow you to start creating, testing, and submitting your creations to our Gallery. We’re moving fast and furious to get this stuff to you, so there might be a few speed bumps and hiccups along the way. We apologize in advance, but trust us, the end result will be well worth it.

  • The (very excited, but tired) Yahoo! Mobile team
Filed under: Mobile Widgets
Posted by Ed