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March 29, 2007

Release of our API & Analytics / Maintenance

We will be performing maintenance tonight (3/29) from 7pm to 8pm Pacific.  The maintenance will likely take under 30 minutes, but during this period of time, the site may be partially or completely unavailable. 

Once the maintenance is completed, the yourminis API will be available for all developers.  Thanks to those of you who have participated in our private beta - you have helped us strengthen then API.

This change is implemented with a new "developers" tab, which will give you all of the necessary information surrounding our API.  In addition, this new tab will enable you to upload your finished work product into the "labs" area of the community, allowing other members of the community to interact with your newly created widget.

In addition to allowing developers to create and distribute their widgets, we're also giving them the ability to analyze how that widget is being leveraged throughout the Internet.  Our reporting console will provide information including the number of views, a comparison of new vs. return viewers, the average number of views per viewer, the number of views per domain and the number of views per country.  Below is a simple snapshot of a reporting summary:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally, we've managed to fix a number of issues with this release:

  • dezamp pointed out two issues that we were able to resolve.  First, the "mark all as read" feature was not working within the Digg widget.  Second, the hover over within the bookmarks widget showed the details for the wrong item. 
  • mjmj pointed out that we somehow "broke" the functionality of RSS widgets in minimal view - that is if they were clicked and then minimized again. 
  • As others of you have done, Doymarn has downloaded our desktop widget environment - and he's found some issues with the notepad widget which are now corrected.  Doymarn also suggested that we add the "copy to desktop" functionality to the widgets within the startpage - and so we have.
  • It seems that we weren't encoding data in our embedded widgets properly - and thanks to harrycaul, we now are!
  • There was an issue with changing the title within the RSS widget.  It seems that the title would just become "undefined".  Thanks to terenceonline for reporting it.
  • We've made the MP3 player resizable horizontally for those of you with small sidebars on your blog.  Thanks for pointing this out to us, Bill - now you can put the MP3 player back into your sidebar!

As always, it's likely that we've fixed more than just what's listed here.  And it's also possible that we broke some thing too...  So please keep the comments coming and we'll do our best to add your feature suggestions and fix any issues!

Posted by Goowy on March 29, 2007 at 03:53 PM in maintenance, product updates | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

March 27, 2007

Adobe Labs Showcase Site

The yourminis.com desktop widget implementation has just been added to the Adobe Labs Showcase Site.  It's great to be selected as a featured implementation of the Apollo platform.  Stay tuned as we keep working with the very talented folks at Adobe to continuously improve our implementation.

Posted by Goowy on March 27, 2007 at 07:54 PM in news | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 21, 2007

Hart Woolery & Apollo

One of our superstar developers, Hart Woolery, recently presented at an ApolloCamp.  He did a terrific job of taking the audience through an overview of the yourminis.com site, adding widgets to the desktop leveraging the power of Apollo, and even showed off our API functionality.  The video is a bit long, but it's a must see if you're interesting in yourminis. 

Posted by Goowy on March 21, 2007 at 10:22 AM in general info | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 20, 2007

Desktop Widgets Available

Thanks to the Adobe Apollo platform, you can now take the power and interactivity of the yourminis widgets and bring them to your desktop!  Customize any widget from the widget gallery, and then click "copy to desktop" to add that exact widget to your desktop outside of the browser.  Once on your desktop you can continue to interact with and customize the widget.

As Apollo is still very new, here's some background information on Apollo from Adobe:

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

As you will notice, the Apollo release is currently an alpha version, and so our release should also be considered to be alpha.  As Apollo evolves, you will need to update both the Apollo runtime and the yourminis Apollo (air) files to get the most current and least issue prone components.

To get started with this, you will need to two things:

  1. If you haven't already done so, get the Apollo runtime.  The Apollo runtime is currently available for both Windows and Mac. 
  2. Once you've downloaded and installed the runtime, you'll need to download and install the yourminis air file. 

As soon as the installation of the yourminis air file is complete, our widget manager will appear on your desktop, along with some default widgets.  You'll be able to hide or display individual widgets from the widget manager - or remove them completely.  You'll also be able to customize and interact with the widgets that are displayed on your desktop.  As a heads up, make sure to run the widget manager when you want to have the yourminis widgets displayed on the desktop - or when you want to add new ones from the gallery. 

Try it out and feel free to share your feature suggestions and bug reports with us in our forums - but be gentle, as this is an alpha release!

Posted by Goowy on March 20, 2007 at 09:11 PM | | Comments (23) | TrackBack (0)

March 16, 2007

Blog Widgets

We've just expanded our community to include blog widgets!  If you look at the community site, you'll see a new tab which takes you to our blogs section.   This area of the site allows you to view our collection of featured, top rated and recently added blogs.  If you don't see a blog that you like, or if you simply want to customize the look and feel of a blog widget, all you have to do is click on the "add a blog widget" link, and follow the prompts.  Your widget with the specific blog content that you defined will now exist in our community for others to use, rate and comment on!

More exciting releases coming up, so stay tuned!

Posted by Goowy on March 16, 2007 at 03:21 PM in product updates | | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

March 11, 2007

Moving to ActionScript 3

We've decided that it's finally time for us to move to ActionScript 3 and Flash 9.  The biggest reasons for this decision is centered around our API, as we will be able to allow third party developers to use the power of AS3 and also to leverage Flex 2.  However, our core members will also see a marked improvement in performance.  According to the Adobe press release on Flash 9:

Flash Player 9 achieves up to 10 times faster performance through ActionScript 3.0 and a new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM), which features a Just In Time (JIT) compiler that translates ActionScript bytecode to native machine code for maximum execution speed.

For most of you, this will have no impact whatsoever.  There are about 7% of you that are actually running Flash 8 and you will need to upgrade your Flash version in order to continue accessing our widgets and startpage. 

To upgrade your Flash version, simply visit Adobe's Flash 9 site.

We will be performing our changes within 1-2 weeks, so you definitely have some time to upgrade before our changes are deployed.

Posted by Goowy on March 11, 2007 at 10:27 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

March 08, 2007

Latest Product Updates

Some of you may have noticed some changes that were put into production yesterday.  We have added a  new "countdown" widget which you can use to keep readers of your blog, startpage or social network aware of the time left until a certain event takes place (birthday, party, product launch, etc.).  Below we have a countdown showing the amount of time until the South by South West Web Awards ceremony kicks off on March 11th at 7:00pm - wish us luck in bringing home the "Technical Achievement" award.



For more widgets please visit www.yourminis.com

In addition, we've fixed a number of items.  The following is a shout out to those of you who have helped us find and resolve these issues:

  • One of our featured members, mjmj found an issue with having recently added feeds disappear as additional content is added to the page - this has been resolved.
  • mjmj also pointed out an issue with the public pages widget being a bit of a performance hog - we've taken care of that now.
  • Another one of our featured members, Lawz, pointed out that we removed the URL link when locking the Fav Tabs widget.  We've corrected this issue.
  • We have a number of issues with the calendar widget.  It seems that we weren't displaying repeating events that were daily or monthly, although we were supporting this for weekly events - definitely weird.  Thanks to jive for pointing this out.  Thanks also goes out to dberthia for pointing out that we didn't auto convert from webcal:// to http:// (where possible) and that our support for Basecamp ICS files was somewhat limited.  All of these issues have been addressed.
  • acidheat informed us of an issue with the notepad widget, where the scrollbars didn't appear, even when necessary.  We found the same issue existed in our text editor widget as well, and we have corrected both widgets.
  • senseBOP and some other members have helped us track down an issue where some feeds marked as read would end up being unread again, they next time they were viewed.  This should now be fixed.
  • There was a weird problem found by pintu, where the MP3 player occasionally just displayed the "MP3" instead of the name of the current track.  We think that this is now resolved.
  • Robin discovered that some of our widgets didn't work too well when accessed with the Opera browser on the Windows platform.  We've been able to address this issue.

Finally, at the request of many of our members (Hamsternator, dberthia, stevepender), we've added the ability to link through to the root level blog when using the RSS widget.  All you have to do is click on the icon in the upper left hand side of the widget to open up the specific blog.

For those of you who haven't begun to build up your profile, what are you waiting for? :)  Go ahead and upload a thumbnail picture, add a description, some interests and publish some pages.  As you can see, we want to thank our members for helping us find and resolve issues with the system - and we want to link to your profiles!

As always, please provide your comments/thoughts/suggestions in our forums and directly in the community area of the site.  Thanks for your continued support!

Posted by Goowy on March 08, 2007 at 07:10 PM in product updates | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)