Today we launched an update of the Blueprint SDK with additions and changes that will make development easier–and help you prepare for the rollout of more extensions next year.

1. Test your Blueprint with ease
Blueprint lets you test your application in a desktop browser. Instead of going to Yahoo!’s mobile homepage and finding a list of your subscriptions, you can now go to http://devtest.m.yahoo.com to see all the Blueprint services you have uploaded for testing. You’ll be asked to sign in (if you haven’t already); then you can click on any of the services listed to test and debug it.

The new URL, http://devtest.m.yahoo.com, works in most PC browsers (we recommend Firefox) and also on mobile devices.

2. Goodbye Snippets. For now.
We introduced Snippets as an alternative way to write a simple service that is integrated with Yahoo!’s mobile homepage. As a developer, you had to choose between writing a Snippet that can contain only one landing page and writing a full-featured Widget. With the addition to the Blueprint Platform of different Runtimes to deploy such services as Mobile Widgets for Yahoo! Go, stand-alone Mobile Apps, and Mobile Sites, the Snippet is no longer needed. With this SDK update the original Snippet format is no longer supported. We are reviewing the concept and will provide you with something comparable when we officially release the Runtime for Mobile Sites.

3. Actually, size does matter!
The Blueprint sample code packages and SDK templates contain an updated and extended set of icons, including larger sizes. In the previous release, we provided icons with a maximum size of 52×52 pixels; now we have icon sizes up to 70×70. You need at least a 70×70 icon to get the magnification effect in Yahoo! Go when a user selects your Widget on devices with a higher resolution than QVGA (240×320). Oh, and yes, the sample icons look much better.

4. PHP documentation included
This documentation is already available separately from our Downloads page, but now we’ve included it in the SDK package, along with the PHP library it describes. If you are a PHP fan, please check it out. The new documentation will help you to output Blueprint XML using concise PHP code.

The new SDK is available from our downloads page at: http://mobile.yahoo.com/developers/download