March 18, 2008

An Easy-to-Use Blueprint for Mobile Widgets

The Yahoo! Mobile team recently opened up our mobile products so that now any developer can build a Mobile Widget using the Yahoo! Mobile Developer Platform.

Blueprint is the name of Yahoo!'s new Mobile Widget language, currently in beta. Now any developer with XML skills can create a Mobile Widget using the Blueprint SDK. Blueprint lets you define the business and UI logic and leave visualization to the Widget Engine renderer. You provide the content and services you want to build into your Mobile Widget. Our developer platform takes care of the other stuff—like making your widget attractive on the various devices we support.

Once you’re done coding, you can test your widget on our Mobile Developer site, and then upload it to our Mobile Widget Gallery for distribution via Yahoo!’s mobile products. To check out the Mobile Widgets already submitted by developers, download Yahoo! Go 3.0 or visit our mobile home page on your device and go to the Widget Gallery.

Please help us create a colorful kaleidoscope of Mobile Widgets. We’d also love to hear what you think of the new Blueprint language. To find the Blueprint SDK and all relevant info for widget developers, visit the Yahoo! Mobile Developer home.

Our ultimate vision is to offer a cross-device platform that lets you code a widget once, and then have it run seamlessly across the web, desktop, and mobile devices, but we are not quite there yet. As you know, mobile development is a challenging beast, with many different devices, operating systems and screen sizes. Our first priority with the Yahoo! Mobile Developer Platform has been to balance device reach and the power of the language. The good news is that now you can write your Mobile Widget once, and it will seamlessly run in HTML and some xHTML mobile web browsers, as well as all devices that support Yahoo! Go 3.0. We are rapidly working towards ensuring that your mobile widget is accessible in hundreds of mobile devices by the end of this year.

For those of you who are interested in keeping in the loop on Yahoo! Mobile development, the best way to get the latest news and interact with our Mobile Developer Community is via the Y! Mobile Developer blog and Y! Mobile Discussion Group.

So check out the new Mobile Platform, try writing a Mobile Widget and tell us what you think.

Thanks!

Shan-lyn Ma
Yahoo! Mobile

Posted at March 18, 2008 5:05 PM

Comments

Posted by: Satya at October 5, 2008 8:53 PM