Yahoo’s first Developer Day and Open Hack Day is well underway, with the Developer Day talks and workshops done and hacking now in seriously caffeinated progress. There was big news yesterday: Yahoo! Mail — with 247 million users — announced an API, the Yahoo! Developer Network announced a new user-authentication API, and some other APIs were enhanced (my favorite: Flickr is now offering JSON).
It was a big day for the YUI developer team. Nate Koechley kicked things off in the morning with a standing-room-only crowd exploring the YUI CSS toolkit, while Todd Kloots, Adam Moore, Steven Peterson, Allen Rabinovich, and Thomas Sha followed with additional workshops. Matt Sweeney gave one of the featured talks of the afternoon, "Web 2.0: Getting It Right the Second Time" (slides available here). More than 300 developers packed the conference building at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale headquarters for the sessions, which led up to last night’s concert by Beck on the lawn (the puppets were amazing, and there’s a funky little video that Yahoo!’s and Beck’s marketing people put together).
Many gallons of Red Bull have been consumed throughout the night, and hacks (including many using YUI) are being assembled this morning; we can’t wait to see what everyone’s cooked up when the show starts at 3 p.m.
For those who attended or who are interested in exploring some of the material the YUI team prepared for the Developer Day workshops, here are some links to lab files and presentations.
- Nate’s CSS Reset, Fonts, & Grids Workshop: PowerPoint, Lab 1, Lab 2, Lab 3
- Matt’s Animation Utility Workshop: Lab files (zip)
- Todd’s Menu Control Workshop: Lab files and presentation (zip)
- Steven’s Container Workshop: Lab files and presentation (zip)
- Adam’s Event Utility Workshop: Lab files (zip)
- Thomas’s Connection Manager Workshop: Lab files and presentation (zip)
Yahoo! Mail is more than an application now, it’s a platform. Learn how to use the new Yahoo! Mail Web Service for building entirely new applications on a powerful platform for sending, retrieving and searching mail.
Every form of virtual community eventually tries to meet in the real world, to various degrees of success. Why do some communities meet offline so easily and others never do? Andy Baio, creator and co-founder of Upcoming.org, uses case studies and original interviews to try to understand this question. From the telegraph and ham radio to Digg and Yelp, he’ll discuss the critical factors and best practices to get users out of the house and connecting in meatspace.
CSS 
In this workshop we will look at several challenges that web 2.0 can present to its consumers if code development is done in haste and without proper symantic considerations. Not all users choose to use the mouse and not all of them may find drag-and-drop slow enough to respond in a timely fashion. So what’s a hacker to do?
In this session we’ll explore Yahoo! Maps as the display platform for Yahoo!’s Local content offerings. Yahoo! Local’s lead developers will dive into the highlights of the latest Flash & AJAX Maps APIs and review numerous Local APIs like Local Search, Upcoming Events and the geocoder.
The drama of web-services hacks often plays out on the canvas of the web browser as a dynamic assembly of information within the browser’s Document Object Model — a model not originally intended to support intensive GUI development. But the DOM API has proven both resilient and problematic in some surprising ways. Yahoo!’s leading JavaScript architect and 
Animation can be a powerful tool in the creation of learnable, intuitive rich interfaces. It can also add a degree of polish and smoothness that helps separate classy interfaces from also-rans. The 
Event-driven programming in the browser requires, at the most basic level, a tool that normalizes eccentric cross-browser behaviors and helps to mitigate patterns that lead to memory leaks in some mainstream browsers. The 
In our only plenary session of the day, Yahoo!’s Product Strategy chief Bradley Horowitz will discuss the ecosystem created by the diverse family of Yahoo web services. Stay tuned for a future blog post for more on Bradley’s talk.
Menus are often the core navigation for a web site or application. As such they should be easy to use and accessible to all users regardless of how they choose to navigate: via their keyboard, mouse or with the help of a screen reader. The 
Ever wonder how those sweet little instant-search boxes work? Here’s your chance to find out! In just under an hour, you’ll create, test, and run your very own search application, powered by Yahoo!’s open Search APIs. (And if you’re not careful, you may learn something useful about structured HTML, CSS, and object-oriented programming.)
How do you build a lightning fast hack? Come meet the people responsible for providing a center of expertise to improve performance across all Yahoo! products worldwide. How much of the end user’s time is spent requesting the HTML document? What percentage of users have an empty cache on Yahoo! Front Page? What should you keep in mind to ensure your hack is optimized for performance? Find out the answers to these questions and more at this session.
PHP has become amazingly popular due to its simple pragmatic approach to solving the web problem. As the web evolves and users demand even more dynamic web applications, the need for PHP keeps growing. People want richer web applications, they want AJAX, JSON and client-side magic to turn what used to be a series of linked pages into something resembling a desktop application.
The age of pop-up blockers has, for many developers, meant the death of dialoging or messaging in context, requiring separate pages for gathering or displaying even the simple information. In-page panels and dialogs, built within the DOM, provide an alternative to pop-ups and can reopen the possiblity of contextual windows that either add information to the interface or gather additional information from the user. Two YUI components, 
Got some HTML and JS skills? Got Flash and maybe some COM/Win32? Want to write a collaborative piece of software that integrates with Messenger? Then you’ll want to attend this class and learn some quick tricks to get you started writing Messenger Plug-ins. The coolest plug-ins will have the opportunity to be hosted on Yahoo! so you can share your creation with some 66+ million users!
ZoneTag: Hack with Mobile Photo Capture — Simply by Writing a Web Service! 
The past five years have seen the emergence of significant new trends in what it means to “hack” in a networked world. Paul Rademacher’s brilliant HousingMaps project broke new ground, reverse-engineering the Google Maps API and marrying it to Craigslist real estate listings, with a result so fundamentally useful that it transcended even the substantial virtues of the services on which it was built. It was a great moment for hackers, who had been mashing things up for decades; and the subsequent storm of mashups has brought the hacker back to center of the software-development fold.
From Oddpost to Google Maps, some of the most important milestones in web development over the past five years have shared a common ingredient: The use of in-page HTTP requests to create “persistent interfaces” that endure while the user interacts with, adds, and enhances data. Driven by non-standard XMLHttpRequest interface pioneered by Microsoft, these kinds of applications are now supported by all major browsers. The 
In this workshop, two of Yahoo!’s premier Flash developers will guide you through three sample Flash applications that utilize the Yahoo APIs. The three sample applications will include a Flash-based Yahoo Maps client (simplified), a Flickr Photo Viewer, and an Upcoming.org Event Viewer. For each of the applications, we’ll describe in detail what tools the you’ll need in order to leverage the Yahoo APIs; we’ll also explore how the API functionality integrates into the Flash environment. Note: The applications explored in this workshop will be written in ActionScript 2; some familiarity with the Flash technology and the language will be required.
