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Innovation
Christian Heilmann | http://wait-till-i.com | http://scriptingenabled.org
Sunderland, UK, University Hack Challenge, January 2009
5. To me it means:
“Altering a system to do what
you want it to do using what
is at your disposal.”
6. It also means having a lot of
fun trying to make things do
what they weren’t made for.
10. We want you to show us what
can be built using the systems
we (and others) offer...
11. ...that makes a difference in
your lives and make the
things you care about easier
to achieve.
18. The oldest way is to cheat
your way in using a very cool
piece of software.
20. Using cURL, you can be your
own browser and get any
data from the web to remix.
23. This is why clever companies
realized that it does make
sense to offer their data in
easier to digest formats.
27. Using RSS or Atom feeds you
get data in a predictable and
easy to convert format.
28. It doesn’t allow you to request
specific data or define a
different format though.
30. REST based Web Services
allow you to request the
correct data from a system.
37. A lot of web services also
allow you to choose your data
format.
40. This makes it dead easy to get
the data and re-use it in your
own interfaces.
44. Or if you like SQL-style data
conversion there’s YQL:
46. Both of these systems allow
you to reach data from Yahoo
and other services and pre-
filter it for use in your own
hacks.
47. Now you got the access and
you got the data. Time to
consider the users.
49. I’ve been developing for the
web for 12 years and it still is a
mystery to me why some
things just don’t work.
50. The technologies are easy
enough:
HTML for structure
CSS for presentation
JavaScript for behaviour
52. You have no idea about the
user’s setup, ability or rights
to change their technical
environment.
53. And then there are the
browsers and all their
wonderful bugs and quirks.
54. This is why it is a good start to
use libraries or frameworks.
55. Their only reason of being is to
make your life as a developer
easier and development less
random.
56. Here are our helpers:
YUI
BluePrint
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ http://mobile.yahoo.com/developers
57. Using these, you can quickly
build interfaces that work on
the web and mobiles.
59. The newest way of access that
systems and companies allow
you these days is opening up
their address books.
64. I am a big fan of accessibility.
65. The web is supposed to be for
everybody – regardless of
physical or mental access
restrictions.
69. I took the API and Antonia’s
findings and built
EasyYouTube.
70. Screenshot of Easy YouTube
http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/?http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkdZmi85gxk
71. Easy controls
★
Option to search for videos
★
Copy and paste video URL to share
★
Select video size
★
Easy Volume Control
★
Option to show a playlist created with del.icio.us
★
Option to search YouTube
★
API to automatically open videos in Easy YouTube
★
Documentation how to host it yourself
★
Open Source
★
73. Not all of my updates there
are valid for re-distribution
though.
74. So I use Pipes to filter my
updates and get them back as
JSON:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?
_id=f7229d01b79e508d543fb84e8a0abb0dd
75. And adding a few more lines
of JavaScript I can now
display my “useful tweets” on
my blog:
79. One cool thing is
that SlideShare
automatically
creates
transcripts of
your slides:
80. So I’ve used this to create a
version that is easily
accessible for blind people or
those who don’t have Flash.
82. Using YQL, it was also easy to
write a JavaScript wrapper
that allows you to show the
transcripts with your slides.
84. However, coming here I
wanted to show a quick new
example and spent an hour
on Sunday on a hack.
86. I got all this emails from
Twitter telling me about
people following me.
88. Or what I was telling the
world before they left me.
89. So I dug into the API a bit and
built TweetEffect.com
95. I put it up, and started testing
edge cases.
96. One of them was Guy
Kawasaki, whom I knew has a
lot of followers and updates.
97. One of them was Guy
Kawasaki, whom I knew has a
lot of followers and updates.
102. It is a matter of wanting to
change what we have and be
ready to play.
104. And we do this to see if we do
a good job in explaining our
offers to the developer world.