API

ActionScript is a very pow­er­ful pro­gram­ming lan­guage used in nu­mer­ous Adobe Flash and Flex ap­pli­ca­tions. It pro­vides an ob­ject-ori­ent­ed class level en­vi­ron­ment with many ad­van­tages to the av­er­age de­vel­op­er. In this ex­am­ple we’ll be con­struct­ing a video wall pulling the top videos from YouTube’s Tech feed. We will most­ly be cov­er­ing ba­sic ActionScript tech­niques, thus it is not re­quired to be an ex­cep­tion­al whiz at pro­gram­ming. For this tu­to­ri­al I’ll be us­ing Adobe Flash CS3 with ActionScript (...)

The smash-hit puz­zle game Angry Birds made big head­li­nes to­day with its par­ent com­pa­ny's an­nounce­ment of its own sales sys­tem that will route around the Android Market and let con­sumers run up charges di­rect­ly on the month­ly bill sent to them by their tele­phone car­ri­er. Called the Bad Piggy Bank, the in-app pay­ment sys­tem will al­so be of­fered to other de­vel­op­ers as a ser­vice. This is not just a sto­ry about Android strug­gling to keep de­vel­op­ers hap­py, though. Mobile de­vel­op­ers can pro­gram (...)

Documentation is like gift wrap­ping. It seems like su­per­flu­ous fluff, but your fam­i­ly tends to be rather dis­ap­point­ed when their pre­sents ar­rive in su­per­mar­ket car­ri­er bags, so you have to feign some sort of at­tempt at mak­ing your gift look en­tic­ing. Documentation doesn’t have to be all hard work and sel­lotap­ing your­self to a table – you can make it use­ful and rel­e­vant. Documentation gets a pret­ty rough deal. It tends to get left un­til the end of a pro­ject, when some poor de­vel­op­er is (...)

bed­narz writes "Without ex­pla­na­tion, Apple has dis­abled a jail­break de­tec­tion API in iOS, less than six months after in­tro­duc­ing it. Device man­age­ment ven­dors say the rea­sons for the de­ci­sion are a mys­tery, but in­sist they can use al­ter­na­tives to dis­cov­er if an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad has been mod­i­fied so it can load and al­ter ap­pli­ca­tions out­side of Apple's iTunes-based App Store." Read more of this sto­ry at (...)

Right about now, a lot of us are scratch­ing our heads about what to give peo­ple for the hol­i­days. Well, if the per­son you are look­ing for us­es Twitter a lot, try Hunch’s new Gift-O-Matic. You just plug in their Twitter han­dle, and Hunch spits out a list of gift sug­ges­tions. The Gift-O-Matic is just some­thing a cou­ple Hunch em­ploy­ees threw to­geth­er to show off the Hunch API (which pow­ers re­al gift sug­ges­tions at Gifts.com based on your Facebook friends). Essentially, Hunch is map­ping your (...)

Anonymous, the group of vig­i­lante hack­ers launch­ing cy­ber­at­tacks again­st groups who have hin­dered the Wikileaks web­site, have al­ready suc­ceed­ed in slow­ing or down­ing a num­ber of ma­jor web­sites. Now, their at­tacks have fo­cused in on two of their long-term tar­gets: Amazon, who shut down Wikileaks host­ing, and PayPal, who stopped al­low­ing the whistle-blow­ing web­site to re­ceive do­na­tions through their ser­vice. As re­port­ed by Computer World, start­ing at about 8am, Pacific Time, on December 9th, (...)

Amazon has launched SDKs for Android and iOS, aimed at mak­ing it easier for soft­ware de­vel­op­ers to call an AWS web ser­vice API di­rect­ly from a mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tion. With the mo­bile SDKs, de­vel­op­ers can write soft­ware that us­es AWS in­fras­truc­ture in their mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tions, in­clud­ing: Store and re­trieve data us­ing Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Add a high­ly avail­able, scal­able, and flex­i­ble non-re­la­tion­al data store us­ing Amazon SimpleDB with lit­tle or no ad­min­is­tra­tive (...)

Amazon has launched SDKs for Android and iOS, aimed at mak­ing it easier for soft­ware de­vel­op­ers to call an AWS web ser­vice API di­rect­ly from a mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tion. With the mo­bile SDKs, de­vel­op­ers can write soft­ware that us­es AWS in­fras­truc­ture in their mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tions, in­clud­ing: Store and re­trieve data us­ing Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Add a high­ly avail­able, scal­able, and flex­i­ble non-re­la­tion­al data store us­ing Amazon SimpleDB with lit­tle or no ad­min­is­tra­tive (...)

Coming this February, at a Mobile World Congress near you, from the com­pa­ny that pop­u­lar­ized the Service Pack: a sec­ond ma­jor up­date to Windows Phone 7. The ob­ser­vant among you will al­ready be leap­ing out of their seats to point out that the first WP7 up­date hasn't even been de­liv­ered yet, but it seems like Microsoft's cal­en­dar stretch­es be­yond the next mon­th and the com­pa­ny's al­ready churn­ing away on en­hanc­ing and im­prov­ing its re­boot­ed mo­bile OS. Such is the scut­tle­butt com­ing out of (...)

This post is made pos­si­ble by Microsoft BizSpark as a new part of the Spark of Genius series that fo­cus­es on a new and in­no­va­tive star­tup each day. Every Thursday, the pro­gram fo­cus­es on star­tups with­in the BizSpark pro­gram and what they’re do­ing to grow. Notes — they’re not sexy or flashy. But when one is the dif­fer­ence be­tween re­mem­ber­ing some­thing of sig­nif­i­cance and for­get­ting it, then it takes on an indis­pens­able pur­pose. Perhaps that ex­plains the me­te­oric rise of Evernote — the (...)

It’s of­fi­cial! Developers now have ac­cess to Foursquare APIv2, the com­pa­nies news de­vel­op­er tool which has been in the works for more than 12 months. Under the new API Foursquare has re­moved XML calls, which in turn will speed up re­spon­se times, while they have made OAuth2 avail­able to al­low for bet­ter se­cu­ri­ty when users con­nect their Foursquare ac­counts to third-par­ty ser­vices. Also in­clud­ed in the API are new end­points that al­low for badge fetch­ing, venue his­to­ry and venue pop­u­lar­i­ty. (...)

Hacking 2.0 WikiLeaks sup­port­ers are milk­ing Twitter's ap­pli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming in­ter­face to car­ry out at­tacks that have led to crip­pling slow­downs at MasterCard.com, Visa.com and other web­sites that cut off fund­ing to the whistle-blow­er out­fit.…

The best box and API for the job UK-based cloud back­up provider Redstor is mov­ing in­to cloud stor­age us­ing EMC's Atmos hard­ware and soft­ware and a data cen­tre build out pro­gram­me.…

Factual, an open data start-up has raised $25 mil­lion in first-round fund­ing to ex­pand its plat­form that pro­vides data for de­vel­op­ers to use in their ap­pli­ca­tions. The Los Angeles-based data-as-as-ser­vice start-up is be­ing fund­ed by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures, who are co-lead­ing the round, along with new back­ing from Hollywood su­per agent Michael Ovitz and Ron Conway’s SV Angel. Danny Rimer of Index Partners and Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz will join Factual’s board. The (...)

Website tem­plate de­signs are very pop­u­lar among mod­ern web de­vel­op­ers. Working with­in a tem­plate de­sign can save boat­loads of time when un­der the dead­line crunch. Not on­ly this but most source code is cre­at­ed with­in HTML5/CSS stan­dards and al­lows for sim­ple cus­tomiza­tions. There are a few tech­niques which can be uti­lized to de­vel­op the best tem­plates. Designers and de­vel­op­ers alike fre­quent­ly cre­ate tem­plates and of­fer them for free down­load to the com­mu­ni­ty. Color the­o­ry, grid de­sign, (...)

With the hy­pe around HTML5 and CSS3 ex­ceed­ing levels not seen since 2005’s Ajax era, it’s worth not­ing that the ex­cite­ment comes with good rea­son: the two spec­i­fi­ca­tions ren­der many years of fea­ture hacks re­dun­dant by re­plac­ing them with na­tive fea­tures. For fun, con­sid­er how many CSS2-based round­ed corners hacks you’ve prob­a­bly glossed over, look­ing for a mag­ic so­lu­tion. These days, with CSS3, the mag­ic is bor­der-ra­dius (and per­haps some ven­dor pre­fix­es) fol­lowed by a cof­fee break. CSS3’s (...)

Posted by rand­fish In ear­ly June of this year, SEOmoz re­leased some rank­ing cor­re­la­tion data about Google's web re­sults and how they mapped again­st speci­fic met­rics. This ex­cit­ing work gave us valu­able in­sight in­to Google's rank­ings sys­tem and both con­firmed many as­sump­tions as well as opened up new li­nes of ques­tions. When Google an­nounced their new Places Results at the end of October, we couldn't help but want to learn more. In November, we gath­ered data for 220 search queries - 20 US (...)

This is a fol­low-on post to My Favourite JavaScript Design Pattern, which will hope­ful­ly an­swer a few of the ques­tions it raised, and provide more in-depth dis­cus­sion on some of the pat­tern’s fea­tures. Those of you who com­pared the pat­tern I de­scribed to a JavaScript Module Pattern are ac­cu­rate in do­ing so, as it does ap­pear to be a very sim­i­lar kind of con­struct. And Christian Heilmann’s Revealing Module Pattern adds a nifty ex­tra fea­ture, by pro­vid­ing more flex­i­bil­i­ty over which meth­ods (...)

Google is our mod­ern day col­lec­tion of the high­est tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vance­ments hu­man­i­ty has ev­er achieved. We are able to con­nect in­to the same in­for­ma­tion from any point on the Earth, al­most in­stan­ta­neous­ly! We live in a tru­ly mag­i­cal time. The pi­oneers shift­ing us in­to this new age are mod­ern web de­sign­ers and ap­pli­ca­tion de­vel­op­ers. There are many re­sources on­line to ref­er­ence when be­gin­ning web­site de­sign. Novice and ex­pert alike can find plen­ty of new in­for­ma­tion us­ing Google’s pow­er­ful (...)

Google yes­ter­day an­nounced the lat­est re­lease of its Android mo­bile op­er­at­ing sys­tem: ver­sion 2.3, co­de­named Gingerbread. While there are a num­ber of cool new fea­tures avail­able to na­tive app de­vel­op­ers (such as front-fac­ing cam­era sup­port, mix­able au­dio ef­fects, and a ton of new sen­sor in­put op­tions), those of us who prefer to work in the browser have re­ceived lit­tle in the way of new toys. Last week, I blogged about the new fea­tures in iOS 4.2, and there were a few of par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est (...)