This latest release is a big one for developers.  We've revamped the developer site, starting with a redesign of the overall site navigation, making it cleaner and easier - you should definitely be able to find whatever it is that you're looking for.  We've also updated the tutorials and have included copy/print sample code with line numbers.  And for you Flex developers out there, we now fully support Flex widgets, along with native AS2 and AS3.  Finally, we've put together an integrated online widget test console that allows you to write, debug and test your AS3/Flex widget code without having to have any development software on your own machine!

In addition to the developer goodies, we've added support for the Yahoo Widget platform as another syndication site.  You can now add any of our widgets to your Yahoo Widget application.  Just click the "Yahoo Widgets" icon in the copy panel:

As always, we're looking forward to hearing your comments in our forums.

This latest update, which went live on Wednesday night - just before Thanksgiving - brings about a number of great additions to the yourminis platform.

• Mac Dashboard Support - You'll see that we've added Mac Dashboard as one of our syndication options.  The "copy" panel lists the Mac Dashboard on all of our widgets, and if you're running Leopard, all you have to do is click on the icon and run the file to see the widget of your choice running in your dashboard environment.
• Enhanced Facebook Support - We've done a number of things to improve our support for Facebook.  First, we've created an "edit" page, for those of you that want to reconfigure your widget in a dedicated area, outside of your profile page.  Next, we've added a "Gallery" page, which will allow you to see all of our featured widget, as long as they're also configured to be Facebook applications.  Finally, we've added API support to allow developers to write to the "Feeds" system when actions are taken within their widgets - this allows the widget to be much more viral in nature, if used appropriately.
• Support for OpenSocial - Although the containers that have implemented OpenSocial are still getting their bearings straight, we have already implemented an "OpenSocial" bridge, which allows developers to create their application once - and the widget will be smart enough to know if it's operating in the context of OpenSocial or of Facebook.  This makes development for these networks that much simpler and faster, while still leveraging the benefits of the networks.
• SEO Tags - We've enabled an administrative option for our partners to allow them to input whatever HTML content they'd like, which will be copied with the widget via it's embed code, as it moves from one network to the next.  This is a great way to add to the branding of the widget, and also allows for an SEO opportunity.
• Regular Expression Blacklisting - Some of our media partners have indicated that they have a large number of sites that need to be blacklisted, and unfortunately typing all of them in would not be efficient enough.  For this reason, we've allowed for administrators to disable widgets from appearing on sites via regular expressions.
• Additional MXP Support - Initially, our MXP Flash Plugin for development only worked on Windows XP.  With this latest release, the new version of the MXP will work with Windows Vista and with the Mac OS.  If you've tried the MXP on those platforms previously, please make sure to try again with the latest version.

Of course we managed to sneak in a few bug fixes as well.  As always, let us know what you think in our forums...

We wanted to thank everyone for the awesome turnout at Lunch 2.0 this week.  We have over 70 people attend in what is shaping up to be a growing San Diego web community.  Thanks again - lets keep the momentum going with more and more social events to bring this community together!

A personal thanks to Andrew Warner and Edward O'Connor for organizing the event.  You can see some of the pics from the event below...

http://www.lunch20.com/2007/11/08/san-diego-now-has-a-growing-lunch-20-community-too/

As we continue to bring on large media companies as partners, we've noticed that there's a tendency for more than one department within the organization to build widgets on our platform.  Generally, someone is authorized to view all of the data for all of the widgets that the company builds, but there are others that should only have access to their specific widgets.  For this reason, we've added the notion of sub administrators to our dashboard.  The main administrator can now assign very granular permissions, either on an individual or group basis.  We think this will be a very useful feature of the platform going forward.

Also, as an added bonus, we've enabled support for our widgets within the Opera browser.  If you browse our gallery while using Opera, you'll see the toolbar change to a "widget" icon:

If you click on that blue widget icon, you'll be able to download that widget and have it live within Opera, even when your on sites other than yourminis.com.  Pretty cool stuff.

As always, please let us know your thoughts and comments in our forums.  More good stuff is on the way...

On October 1st, Adobe released Beta 2 of their AIR product. Just last night, we performed an update which allows any of our AS3 widgets to be run on the desktop via Adobe AIR.

We've made it super simple to get the AIR product. Just click on the "copy me" on any of our AS3 widgets, and then choose the "AIR" option. If AIR isn't running on your machine, we'll prompt you to either start it or to install the product. Once you've installed AIR, you should be able to download any of our AS3 widgets, essentially with one click.

We've embedded one of our AS3 widgets below for those of you that want to try running them on your desktop:

Also, for those of you that just want to install AIR and our widget manager without downloading a particular widget, just click the "Install Now" link below:

Give it a shot and as always, let us know your thoughts...

When: Wednesday, November, 12:05 - 2:00 PM

RSVP: RSVP here

This will be the first Lunch 2.0 in San Diego, so please help us get established by:

Organizing - If you want to be a part of bringing Lunch 2.0 to LA, email me: mail(at)awarner.com

Coming - If you're in San Diego, join us for lunch at goowy.

Inviting others - If you're not in SD, but know people who are, please send them this post.

goowy offers 2 products, yourminis.com, a widget platform that simplifies widget creation, distribution, and discovery and the goowy webtop, a set of robust productivity tools including email, contacts, calendar, IM, file storage, and more. (And it's a great company that keeps supporting the tech community. Thanks guys!)

Upcoming Lunch 2.0s::

• Tuesday, October 9- H2.0 ZendCon, Burlingame, San Francisco
• Friday, October 12- Widemille, Seattle
• Friday, October 12- YellowBot, Burbank, Los Angeles
• Friday, October 12- Tagged / Netvibes, San Francisco
• Tuesday, October 16- The Ladders, New York City
• Wednesday, October 17- Lunch 2.0 D.C., Washington, D.C.
• Friday, October 19- TBA, Redwood City, Silicon Valley
• Monday, October 22- Oracle, Redwood City, Silicon Valley
• Friday, November 2 - TBA, Los Angeles
• Wednesday, November 7 - goowy, San Diego
• Friday, November 9 TBA, Kirkland, Seattle
• Friday, November 16 - TBA, Los Angeles
• December TBA, Waterfront, Seattle
• Friday, December 7 - TBA, Los Angeles
• Wednesday, December 12 TBA, Palo Alto, Silicon Valley
• Friday, January 18 TBA, Seattle

Our latest release includes a number of great improvements, including reporting enhancements, tighter Facebook integration and more.  The specifics of the release are:

Reporting

• Click Reports - We've always tracked URL clicks within the widgets, but we've now begun to track ALL clicks within the widget.  This allows us to create a number of interesting reports.  Perhaps the most interesting of these new reports is our Heat Map Report.  This report pulls up a visual representation of your widget, with an actual Heat Map indicating where users are clicking.  This gives you an incredibly different perspective on how your widget is being utilized out in the world.  A sample heat map is shown below:
  
• Custom Tracking Reports - We have exposed API calls which allow a widget developer to completely track all clicks within a widget with a path.  The end result is a text based view into what users are clicking on, which can be broken down by our usual parameters (geography, user, domain, etc.).
• CSV Export - We've added the ability for users to export the data in any of the reports, making those reports available outside of our system.  To use this functionality, simply pull up a report that you're interested in, as you usually would, and once you're happy with the parameters of the report, simply click the "Export" link at the top of the report.  This will initiate a download of the data points to your local machine.

Facebook

We've added better support for Facebook applications.  When users add your Facebook application widgets, they will be prompted to notify their friends about the application - this will help in spreading your widget.  Once a user adds the widget to their profile, they can change the settings of the widget just as they can in our gallery.  Changes to search criteria, color, etc. will automatically be saved for the next time they initiate an interaction with the widget.  We've also made some tweaks related to how we handle the image representation of the widget - it should look significantly cleaner now.

In addition, we've added one often requested feature - custom email templates.  This allows you to enter in custom HTML code which is used to send out the "invite a friend" message.  And we've also done our usual amount of bug fixes and smaller enhancements.  Let us know what you think!

Late last week we release the yourminis widget API (wAPI), an Actionscript 3.0 Library that allows flash content owners to quickly and easily create engaging widgets that run on both the web and desktop.  We developed the wAPI from the ground up with information collected from our development community to improve the development and overall widget experience.  Some of the additional benefits include:

• Simple Widget Publishing – The latest API allows content owners to publish their existing Actionscript 3.0 widgets/apps and take advantage of a majority of the syndication and reporting features with absolutely no code changes.  Our previous release required that users download our SDK and make code changes before publishing to yourminis.

• Online API Reference – Our latest wAPI Reference is now available online from our developer at http://www.yourminis.com/developers/docs/as3/index.html .  The wAPI Reference docs outline all the packages, classes, methods, events, and properties of the object-oriented, actionscript 3.0 widget API library.  The docs are generated from our wAPI source and include sample code snippets throughtout.  Additionally, the online tutorials reference the docs with links directly to the API being referenced making learning the yourminis widget API that much easier.

• Dynamic API Binding – All widgets developed using the yourminis wAPI Actionscript 3.0 library no longer statically link to the API classes.  This provides the ability to develop on the wAPI without any downloads, using any text/actionscript editor, on any platform.  We do encourage users to download our SDK which includes an .mxp Flash CSE Extension specifically built to make the widget development process easier.

• Event Listeners – The wAPI leverages Actionscript 3.0 EventListener class to dispatchEvents to listening objects.  This allows developers to write more advanced widgets that may have multiple listeners and a complex object hierarchy than was previously possible with the previous yourminis Actionscript 2 widget API.

• Object-Oriented Improvements – We have further broken the main widget functions into separate classes.  This helps make the code easier to understand and to write.  As well, classes such as the HTTPLoader and RSSLoader extend and incorporate existing flash classes and methods making it easier to transition from existing code.  For example, calling widget.navigateToURL instead of flash's navigateToURL will add both URL click tracking to your widget and myspace click support.  If you have code that handles RSSParsing based on a URLLoader, you can use the same code while utilizing the RSSLoader in place of the URLLoader (RSSLoader extends URLLoader)

In addition to the aforementioned widget benefits, developers get all of the innate advantages of using Actionscript 3.0 including (for an overview, check out http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/actionscript3_overview.html)

• Faster processing - "ActionScript 3.0 introduces a new highly optimized ActionScript Virtual Machine, AVM2, which dramatically exceeds the performance possible with AVM1. As a result, ActionScript 3.0 code executes up to 10 times faster than legacy ActionScript code."

• ECMAScript for XML (E4X) – "E4X offers a natural, fluent set of language constructs for manipulating XML. Unlike traditional XML parsing APIs, E4X makes XML feel like a native data type of the language. E4X streamlines the development of applications that manipulate XML by drastically reducing the amount of code needed."

• Regular Expressions – "ActionScript 3.0 includes native support for regular expressions so you can quickly search for and manipulate strings. ActionScript 3.0 implements the regular expressions defined in the ECMAScript Language Specification (ECMA-262)."

• Type safety – "In ActionScript 2.0, type annotations were primarily an aid for developers; at runtime, all values were dynamically typed.  In ActionScript 3.0, type information is preserved at runtime and utilized for a number of purposes. Flash Player performs runtime type checking, improving the system's type safety. Type information is also used to represent variables in native machine representations, improving performance and reducing memory usage."

• Run-time exceptions – "In ActionScript 2.0, many runtime errors would fail in a graceful but silent fashion. This ensured that Flash Player would not display some inexplicable dialog box, which JavaScript did in early web browsers. On the other hand, this lack of error reporting made it more challenging to debug ActionScript programs.   ActionScript 3.0 introduces a variety of runtime exceptions for common error conditions, improving the debugging experience and enabling applications that handle errors robustly. Runtime errors can provide stack traces annotated with source file and line number information, helping to pinpoint errors quickly."

Last but not least, widgets within the yourminis platform continue to take advantage of benefits including:

• Automatic Copying - of your widget to the top startpages, blogging platforms, social networks, and desktop widget platforms, along with inline email sharing

• Tracking - of views, time spent, users, geolocation, interactions, URL clicks, copies, and custom actions for your widget with detailed reporting.

• HTTP/RSS - Proxying, caching, authorization, conversion of RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, ATOM 0.3, and ATOM 1.0 to RSS 2.0 of 3rd party data feeds (without the need for crossdomain.xml)

• Management Dashboard - for updating content, widget configurations, blacklisting, syndication destinations, and 3rd party gallery publishing

• Global caching network  - for faster widget downloads...

Look for added enhancements to our platform over the coming weeks....

We've been quiet for a bit, working on a pretty major release.  We'll have more info on that later in the day, but in the meantime, we wanted to introduce everyone to our latest widget, MTV's VMA Widget:

Get your own text up on the marquee by clicking "MAKE YOUR OWN", type in the text you want, and then click "COPY THIS WIDGET"!