SearchMonkey Developer Day

SearchMonkey Developer Day was an event that took place in the Yahoo! office in Munich on wednesday September 3rd. About 20 developers and site owners took the chance to get to know more about SearchMonkey and how to make search results more useful. Neil Crosby was giving a presentation and showing the SearchMonkey web site, the SearchMonkey Developer Tool and the Yahoo! Search Gallery. After the talk he, Christian Heilmann and Guy Hepworth were answering questions. Then there was the chance to talk and discuss while having some sandwiches and something to drink.

The evening was really interesting and it was nice to meet the three guys from the Yahoo! office in London, Uwe Tippmann, Thomas Schaller and Paul Savage. Hopefully there will be more events and presentations like this in the future. Yahoo! Search BOSS was one topic that already sparked some interest.

The slides of the presentation by Neil Crosby are avaiable on SlideShare, there is a blog post on the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog and photos of the event tagged smmunich can be found on Flickr.

MischMasch 2008-07-03

Some redesigns during the last weeks. MySpace has a new look done by Adaptive Path. The site is less cluttered and navigation is simpler. After five years the personal web site of Jason Santa Maria was redesigned. The interesting thing about the redesign is that the design can be changed to suit the content. Also Chris Heilmann’s site Wait til I come! looks diffrent now.

Flickr founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have left Yahoo! (via Wired), as did del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter (via Daring Fireball). Valleywag posted Stewart’s resignation letter and Wired linked the DIY Yahoo! Resignation Letter.

Firefox 3 supports color profiles, but this is disabled and it has to be turned on manually. More about it by Joi Ito and John Resig

Plazes was acquired by Nokia.

MischMasch 2008-06-12

For some days Google has a new favicon. Favicon is the tiny icon in the browser bar and it can be seen in the list of bookmarks. The reactions were mainly negative. Marissa Mayer wrote a blogpost about it on the Official Google Blog. There are several sets of icons that were designed and up to now there is no final solution. If someone has a nice idea for a favicon, there is a site to submit it to Google.

Today Opera released Opera 9.5. More about the the new version can be read in an article on Dev Opera. The official date for the launch of Firefox 3.0 is June 17th. This will also be the day to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

Now multi-protocol instant messaging application Adium 1.3 supports Facebook Chat. (Via Matthias Pfefferle)

Jeremy Zawodny will be leaving Yahoo!. (Via Daring Fireball)

Apple WWDC 2008 Keynote

Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is taking place in San Francisco right now and started with the Steve Jobs Keynote. The event was live blogged by Mac Rumors, Macworld, Engadget and many other sites.

Main topics of the keynote have been the App Store and some of it’s apps, the iPhone 2.0 Software, the MobileMe service that replaces .Mac and the new iPhone 3G (thinner, GPS, 3G and cheaper).

Steve Jobs also announced that later on there will be given a peak of the new OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

For sure today’s keynote will soon be avaible on the new Apple Keynotes podcast in the iTunes Store.

MischMasch 2008-06-05

Google announced that they will be starting implementing AdSense ads in RSS feeds in Feedburner. (Via Burning Questions)

Blues and rock and roll musician Bo Diddley died on June 2nd. Rest in peace and keep on rockin’.

YouTube added a new beta feature: annotations. Have a look at this video. (Via Chris Heilmann)

Yahoo! released their Yahoo! Address Book API after Google released their Contacts Data API some weeks ago.

MischMasch 2008-05-30

Apple‘s release of Mac OS X 10.5.3 includes not only operating system improvements but adds the ability to sync Google Contacts with Address Book. It only works for iPhone and iPod touch owners, but Lifehacker has a workaround. Although some people experienced problems doing the synchronisation.

Google Gears is now called Gears to make it clear that Gears isn’t just a Google thing. And there will be Firefox 3, Safari and Opera support in the future. So far Gears works with Google Reader, Google Docs, Remember The Milk and now with MySpace Mail. (Via Official Google Blog)

AOL joins OpenSocial.

Google is now hosting copies of jQuery, Prototype, mooTools and Dojo on AJAX Libraries API. (Via Simon Willison)

MischMasch 2008-05-23

Webmonkey was a useful resource for web developers. Back in the ninetees it was started as part of HotWired that was acquired by Lycos in 1999. For a long time it was nothing more than an archive. Now Webmonkey is back, relaunched by Wired based on MediaWiki, making Webmonkey a collaborative project. (Via Jeffrey Veen)

Techmeme, the tech web site aggregating blogs and other news sites, has finally added search.

The New York Times released the beta version of Times Reader for the Mac, a programme with the ability to view the paper offline and with less ads than the web version. Times Reader for the Mac demands the installation of Microsoft Silverlight. So far the reactions are not very positive and there is a lot of criticism on the the use of Microsoft Silverlight.

MischMasch 2008-05-15

Today was the day of acquisitions. Plaxo was acquired by Comcast, Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com were acquired by Ask.com and CNET was acquired by CBS. (Via Twitter)

sevenload, the German image, audio and video portal, provides a REST-style API now.

Google Doctype is an encyclopaedia of web development written by web developers, for web developers, including articles on web security, HTML, CSS, DOM and more. (Via Simon Willison)

MischMasch 2008-05-14

Vidlink is a new app by Google, which lets you record movies and upload them to YouTube using the Mac’s built-in camera or many Firewire or USB video cameras. It supports importing videos from other programms too. (Via Official Google Mac Blog)

Apple has three new Get a Mac ads: Group, Pep Rally and Sad Song.

There is a new iPhone interface for Google Reader at http://www.google.com/reader/i/. (Via Official Google Reader Blog)

Google Maps have now two more options, which can show geo-tagged photos provided by Panoramio or geo-coded Wikipedia articles on maps.

Jeremy Keith liveblogged some talks of this year’s XTech conference.

Eye-Fi, the line of WiFi enabled SD cards, added a new member to the family, a card geotagging photos using WiFi triangulation, just like the iPhone and iPod Touch. (Via JeffCroft.com)