WILLIAM KHOE

A huge win for OpenID project, Yahoo! announced support for the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework for all 248 million active registered Yahoo! users worldwide. OpenID, an open framework based on proven Internet technologies, enables users to consolidate their Internet identity, eliminating the need to create separate IDs and logins at all of the various websites, blogs, photostreams, and profile pages they may visit in the course of their online session. In addition to the many leading Yahoo! services users already enjoy, anyone with a Yahoo! ID will be able to use the same ID for easy access to any sites that support OpenID 2.0.

Yahoo!’s initial OpenID service, which will be available in public beta on January 30, enables a seamless and transparent web experience by allowing users to use their custom OpenID identifier on me.yahoo.com or to simply type in “www.yahoo.com” or “www.flickr.com” on any site that supports OpenID 2.0. Alternatively, web sites that accept OpenID 2.0 will be able to add a simple “Sign-in with Your Yahoo! ID” button to their login pages that will make it even easier for their users. Yahoo! is working with several partners, including Plaxo and JanRain, to make it possible for users to access these sites with their Yahoo! ID from the first day of the public beta.

For more info, visit: http://openid.yahoo.com/

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Apparently a lot of people like how Yahoo! sites look like. The latest string of copycat: Nhac360 is a Vietnamese music site which design clearly resembles that of the new Yahoo! Music site. What surprised me was why they didn’t just use Yahoo!’s CSS to do their site, instead they resorted to their own code that looks like something from the late 90s (tables, image map, etc). Here is a screenshot, click on it to go to their site:

And here’s Yahoo! Music:

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I guess Yahoo! should send them a thank you note.

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We just got back from watching Cloverfield and we are still feeling a bit queezy from the shaky amateurish camera that is the entire movie. I get the art direction that the director is trying to get to, but I feel ripped off spending $10 watching something that looks like a Youtube video but less entertaining. It’s basically a sci-fi take on Blair Witch Project. Note to self: next time, wait a week and read the review…

And here I present to you the Cloverfield monster. Go watch it on DVD.

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I have been working on this player for a while now along with 2 other team members and last week it is finally released! Soon after, it got featured on CNET, Wired and TechCrunch! Yahoo! Media Player enhances your web site or blog by creating an embedded player for each audio link. All the links can be played with one click, turning the page into a playlist.

It’s really exciting to see a product you had a hand on being used by other people out there! If you haven’t seen this player head to Aurgasm.us, a music blog with very nice collection of eclectic songs. I think I might do my own music blog soon.

If your hands start to get itchy and you want to try this player out, head to http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com. It really is as simple as adding one Javascript line!

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I have created a Flex forum dedicated to helping people get through the initial learning curve (which is not much). So drop by anytime and ask anything, I’ll try my best to answer or help look for the answer you are looking for.

Besides the big developer community like Y! Groups flexcoders and Adobe’s own devnet, there are not many Flex communities out there yet, being an emerging technology. Search results for Flex issue often come up fruitless. So I’ll try my best to fill the gap.

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I was at the Adobe Max conference in Chicago last week and as I was enjoying the various delicacies, I ran into…guess who…Bono! But wait a minute, is he a look-alike? Why would Bono look-alike attend a geeky conference? But then again, why would the real Bono do that? (Unless I miss the part where he was a web developer in his previous career)

So I went and asked him if he is really Bono. He answered in a thick Irish accent, “No, I am Shaquille O’neal”.
I was gonna start interogating him, but crowds started to gather, so I took a picture with him instead and I’ll let you guys decide if he’s for real.

Another shot from a distant

A friend of mine did some research that night and found a photo of him about 2 days old. As you can see, he’s got a much shorter hair then. There goes my dream of meeting a real rockstar…

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Meet my new bestfriend, the CEO of Yahoo! Inc, Mr. Jerry Yang! Yes, it’s official, we are BFF!

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I’d like to introduce you to my most visited site so far (10000+ page views per day!): CG Art World
It features the best hand-picked CG Art I have collected from the web. If you like CG Art, even just a little bit, check out this site. I guarantee you’ll like what you see.

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So what did you do this weekend? I had fun with Flex! Based on Ely Greenfield’s DisplayShelf, I present you, yet another ripoff of iTunes CoverFlow, I call mine iCatalog (watch out Apple, I am gonna trademark that name!) Browse bestselling Books, DVD, and Music courtesy of Amazon E-Commerce API. The cover images are huge, so make sure you have a big screen real-estate. (oh, and a fast computer, I got a 2Ghz w/ 2GB of RAM and it still lags)

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like to whet your appetite:

Oh, and please mind the adsense, I’m hoping it’d pay for 1/50th of the hosting fee.

Thanks KrazyDad for showing me how to cache these images on my own server so I can do whatever Bitmap mod I want to ‘em.

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If you use Facebook, now you can enjoy eBayer without getting of your seat! Announcing eBayer for Facebook! Add it to your application from here. You need to be a Facebook member to view/add the app. And as always, feedback is highly encouraged!

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• Refresh button now works. Of course, it’ll be disabled if no item is currently selected.
• Send feedback functionality is implemented. Now you can spam me as you please

Now…time to enjoy the rest of my weekend…

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So I’ve been hearing a lot of cool stuff about Flex and I finally started playing around with tutorials. But there isn’t really any good ones out there and what’s a better way to learn than to create something for real. So I decided to create a Flex eBay browser! I buy and sell quite a few stuff on eBay and I was thinking how I can use Flex to browse listings faster, hence eBayer was born.

This is an initial release, it’s still rough on the edges. If you have a second, please be my guinea pig, test the app and let me know what you think.

Some known bugs/limitation:

• You can only search US listings for now.
• Currency is US $ only for now.
• Mouse-wheel scroll does not work on Firefox (wmode=opaque/transparent bug with flash)
• The app is too tall (?) Most laptop users would not be able to see the bottom.
• Search results are capped at 100 listings for now.
• Description section disappear if you resize your browser to smaller than the flash size.

Features I am working on:

• The refresh button on Item Info panel
• Send Feedback functionality
• Viewing seller feedback
• Real time time-left countdown
• Charts (still not sure what the chart should show)
• Add to a listing ‘Watch List’
• A better error handling
• Listing pagination (not sure if this is really necessary, do people actually paginate through thousands of listings instead of refining their search term?)

Thanks Judah for your HTML Component!

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This set of tools is actually quite old, but I think it’s worth another introduction. The idea is to have the common utilities a web developer cannot live without, all in one page.

Some very useful ones I still use til today:

• Code Paste: Pasting code on email or IM usually ends up with unreadable code. Paste it here and send the URL instead. It has built-in code highlighting!
• Javascript CSS Compressor/Obfuscator: Strip whitespace and comments. Obfuscate Javascript with a click of a button.
• Encode/Decode: Do all sort of character encoding/decoding business here.
• Regex tool: Easily test your regex.

I’d really love feedback on this tool!

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