Greetings from Indonesia! The Yahoo! Mobile asian team had just wrapped up this year’ s Yahoo! Mobile Developer Awards (YMDA) in Jakarta, Indonesia. I’ m glad to report that it was another huge success!

There were 50 teams from various parts of Indonesia taking part in YMDA Indonesia, competing against each other build the best mobile-optimised applications for five of Indonesia’s leading corporate brands – Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI), Code Jawa, Excelcomindo Pratama Tbk (XL), VIVA News, and Yamaha Motor Kencana.

The teams built mobile applications based on briefs given by the sponsor companies. Submissions were judged on usability, quality, innovation, effective use of technology, and relevance to each sponsor company and its customers.

Best in show application

T Fuad (head of Y! mobile, SEA), Matthias Kunze (MD, Y! Mobile Asia), Winner of best in show and celebrity judge, Abdee Slank

You can go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/clasia_media to see pictures from the event as well as screenshots of the winning mobile applications.

If you don’t have hundreds of phones but want to see how your site appears on different clients, check out Firefox’s User Agent Switcher add-on. Blueprint uses a phone’s user agent (essentially a browser ID) to determine rendering. By supplying a different user agent with each HTTP request, you can tell Blueprint to treat your desktop browser like a specific hand-held device.

Ready to try it? Follow these steps:

1. Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59 and click “Add to Firefox”. After downloading the add-on, you will need to restart Firefox.

2. You’ll find a new menu item called “User Agent Switcher” in Firefox’s Tools menu. The Switcher comes with three predefined user agents for desktop browsers.

3. Identify user agents you want to test. Some manufacturers provide this information in their developer documentation, and sites like Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listofuseragentsformobilephones) can also be a good resource. To find your phone’s user agent, open http://whatsmyuseragent.com in the phone’s browser.

4. Add one or more user agents to the Switcher menu. In Firefox, choose Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options… > User Agents > Add…; copy a user-agent string into the “User Agent” field and supply a descriptive name. Examples:

Description: Nokia N90
User Agent: NokiaN90-1/5.0607.7.3 Series60/2.8 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1

Description: Apple iPhone
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/… Safari/…

Then click OK.

To see how your site looks on the selected client, choose the new user agent from the list in the “User Agent Switcher” menu and press Firefox’s Reload button.

Keep in mind that Blueprint does not support every client. But it works with most recent hand-held devices and browsers, and we are constantly adding more. We plan to extend device support significantly in June.

Sometimes even the smartest people need a little help. Though you can achieve amazing results with Blueprint, it can be tricky to get setup and to understand the first steps. Our friends from the Yahoo! Developer Network created a nice two-pager that provides you with a quick overview of Blueprint and gives you six easy steps to create your first mobile web site.

Get it here, print it and use it as your Blueprint cheat sheet: http://mobile.yahoo.com/pdf/handout-blueprint.pdf

There have been quite a few questions on the Developers Group about the types of mobile phones supported by Blueprint for Mobile Sites. In this post we like to give you the current status as well insights into our roadmap.

With Blueprint for Mobile Sites you can easily create mobile web sites from Blueprint mark-up that look great and are optimized to work on a wide range of mobile devices and browsers. As this is a very time consuming process we’ve started with the higher-end devices and the current release of Blueprint supports about 300 devices. This covers the iPhone, the iPod Touch, the newer Nokia Series 60 devices, Windows Mobile devices and the latest Blackberrys.

In addition the mobile site can be viewed on all devices that support the Opera Mini browser. If we can’t display your site on a phone, we will prompt the user to install it.

When we take your Blueprint XML we want to ensure that it looks great on the several thousand devices we are targeting. You can imagine how many adjustments, how much QA and in the end how much time this process actually needs to take. Don’t think only about the screen size, think HTML support (and mark-up bugs), memory limits per page, maximum content sizes a device can handle and limited support for images.

The majority of the traffic in the mobile web comes from higher-end devices, most of which are supported today, but we understand that you (and we) want more – particularly outside North America. Therefore we are excited to let you know that we are in the final phases of rolling out dramatic increases in the number of supported devices as we extend our coverage to include older phones. We expect that by June your Blueprint sites will be rendered on more than 4000 devices and we will post an update once the release is available.

Thank you for your ongoing support and with your feedback we can make this platform even better.

Just a couple days ago at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Yahoo! announced and showed the new Yahoo! Mobile application. You may have already read about it in the press but the feedback and comments we received in the media and also at the booth in Barcelona was stunning. Here are some more details about the new product - focussing on the Yahoo! Mobile app for Smartphones - and how you will be able to create services for it.

The new Yahoo! Mobile app for Smartphones can transform users phones into a world-class Internet experience. It comes with a beautiful and easy-to-use look & feel, powerful and useful features and the possibility to personalize it for the user.

The software has Opera Mini(TM), the world’s most popular mobile Web browser, already integrated and users not only can access the Internet via widgets but also can get the real and full web-experience. The application will be available for most of smartphones and is expected to become available late May this year.

Why is that important for you as a developer?

Yahoo! Mobile for Smartphones will replace the current Yahoo! Go 3.0 client software. The new software can run Blueprint services (all included Yahoo! services are written in Blueprint as well!) and will include a more advanced widget gallery to give you an even better possibility to make your services visible inside a Yahoo! product. While Yahoo! Go 3.0 only supports our first official version of Blueprint 1.0 the new software already includes a Blueprint language version beyond 1.1.

To have your services running in Yahoo! Mobile for Smartphones when it launches, you can do the following right now:

• Make your code at least Blueprint 1.0 compliant. We see still a lot of services that use pre-1.0 controls such as “section” or “submodule”. Please check carefully the release notes in the SDK download package to see which controls and components have been deprecated over time.

• If you don’t plan to release your mobile service within Yahoo! Go for the next couple months, please start right away with the Blueprint 1.1 language specification. Blueprint 1.1 gives you more freedom in how you can design your UI, supports video transcoding and much more. Using Blueprint 1.1 will allow you to create your own mobile website without any Yahoo! branding and even using your own URL.

As soon as Yahoo! Mobile for smartphones is available you can easily publish your service in the new gallery catalogue. The submission process for the inclusion in the gallery will remain the same: You code, you publish, we take a quick look and after a few days millions of users may access your service within Yahoo! Mobile.

To be one of the first to test the new application, you may sign up to get notified when Yahoo! Mobile launches. Simply go to mobile.yahoo.com from your phone or PC and leave your contact details.

We are very happy to introduce the new version of our Blueprint mobile platform and the launch of the Runtime for Mobile Sites – both of which are available today.

Blueprint 1.1

It’s been over half a year since the launch of Blueprint 1.0 and we’ve received great feedback from developers – it was good to know what’s working for you and which areas we could improve. For Blueprint 1.1 we’ve listened to your requests and added many new visual elements to make your mobile applications even prettier. As a part of this we’re introducing much better support for advertising as well as more flexible image handling.

Behind location and maps our next most requested language feature was video and we’re pleased to announce we are now supporting video transcoding directly from the Blueprint language! To support this, the Blueprint 1.1 platform can take a Flash video source and convert it to over 40 different video formats, including RTSP or Quicktime PDL in real-time, depending on the capabilities of the user’s handset.

The new Blueprint 1.1 Language Specification is also now available as an online reference – be sure to check it out on the mobile developers site along with the updated Quickstart and new Deployment Guide. You can find a summary of the language changes in the SDK release notes available as part of the download package.

Runtime for Mobile Sites

The latest revision to the Blueprint language is rolling out first on the web and finally we’re addressing the single biggest wish that developers had: to be able to host Blueprint outside of the Yahoo! homepage.

In the all new Blueprint Application Manager you can now instantly publish your Blueprint service as a mobile website - we automatically issue an URL for your service. Using this URL – which is based on your identifier – the service can be accessed in a mobile browser without requiring the user to install your software.

But wait, there’s more - wanna have your own domain? No problem! You can set a DNS CNAME to map from your own domain to your Blueprint identifier on our system. For example, you can setup a CNAME alias to map from m.mywidget.com to widget123.bpapps.com so that your users can access the mobile site directly using m.mywidget.com. There’s no landing page, no Yahoo! homepage, and not even any Yahoo! branding

The New Application Manager

With Blueprint 1.1. we’ve also enhanced the way you can manage your Blueprint applications, widgets and mobile sites. Your applications that are currently in development and need to be tested are now part of the Application Manager which gives you a complete view of all your Blueprint projects. Once you have uploaded your application package you can easily test your service and publish it all from the same console. The new Blueprint Application Manager also gives you access to your user and usage statistics, mobile aliases, publishing status and much more.

So come on - download the new Blueprint 1.1 SDK from http://mobile.yahoo.com/developers/download, go through the online documentation and build fantastic mobile experiences!

Have fun!

The Yahoo! Blueprint Team

Spend Valentine’s Day a bit differently this year and hack your beloved one a mobile service in Yahoo! Blueprint!

Bangalore Open, Yahoo! India’s Hack Day, takes place the weekend of February 14 and February 15 in Bangalore , India . Following the tradition of Yahoo!’s Open Hack Days, the event in Bangalore will give you deep insights into the latest Yahoo! platforms and services for developers. Besides Y!OS, Open Mail, BOSS and other technologies, Yahoo! Blueprint will play a major role in the hacks.

Check out event information on Upcoming and register here: http://hackdayindia.eventwax.com/open-hack-2009

Mobile Monday follow-up

This month’s Mobile Monday meeting for the Silicon Valley group took place at the Yahoo! Headquarters in Sunnyvale. We thank everyone who came by and spent an evening with us for presentations about Blueprint and mobile design. We were asked several times to share the slides from Markus Spiering’s quick-development tutorial and we are happy to do so:

This presentation explains the handful of steps needed for creating a Blueprint mobile service (in this case as a Yahoo! Go 3.0 Widget) and walks you through the deployment and testing process.

Here are some pictures of this event on Flickr:

Blackberry Bold and icon sizes

Yahoo! Go is now available for the Blackberry Bold. You can download the client by visiting http://get.go.yahoo.com straight from your Blackberry Bold browser. As already announced with our latest SDK update, 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). The new Blackberry Bold is such device, so please be sure to submit larger icons to make your Widget look pretty on this device.

This page lists all the devices Yahoo! Go 3.0 is currently available: http://mobile.yahoo.com/go/phones

The Mobile Monday organisation, a global community of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influentials, will have their meeting of the Silicon Valley branch at the Yahoo! headquarters on December 1st, 2008 from 7 pm to 9 pm. The focus of this meeting will be an introduction of Blueprint, Yahoo!’s open mobile development platform and your chance to meet other mobile enthusiats as well the Yahoo! Blueprint team.

Mobile Monday meetings are free and open for everyone that is interested in Mobile. The original invite can be seen on the Mobile Monday Silicon Valley blog or on Upcoming. If you’d like to come, please make sure to sign-up at: http://mobilemondaysv.eventbrite.com to get access to the Yahoo! campus on Monday night.

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