Yahoo! is up talking. They’re talking about their increased use of Flash (including a new AS3 Maps API). They’re here to show two AIR apps they’ve written.
They’re showing a widget–what they call a “sidebar” application–written in AS2 wrapped as an AS3/AIR application. The widget has four different areas all pulling data. Wrapping the AS2 app took very little effort, so all of their old AS2 code can be ported to AIR very easily.
They feel putting this stuff on the desktop as a “sidebar” will drive a lot of traffic to their web property; people can interact with the widget to get more detail on stock information, more info on a news story, and so forth.
Now they’re showing a Music Blog Remixers. The developer is talking about how much he loves the Flex tools and is a Java/PHP convert.
Apparently, music blogs are the new distribution channel for music on the web, especially indie music. Their app helps you navigate the music blogosphere and remix them; take the best parts of music blogs and combine them into a custom playlist. You can then export the playlist and post it on your blog.
Now available on next.yahoo.com.
Now we’re seeing Yahoo! Live, which lets you view live video feeds. It’s currently a Flex 2 app but they have plans to upgrade it to Flex 3 / AIR. They let you embed the live video feed all over the place. They want to use AIR so the video feed stays live even if you close the browser and so they can do alerts in the native OS.
We’ve been very happy with how rapidly we can build solutions with Flex and AIR. We built Live in 6 months with 4 full-time people. Software development moves slower the more developers you add to the project, so it’s important for us to choose technologies that let us build software rapidly with small teams.
Ben Galbraith 
Hi James,Sad to see the site close but as you say, hfplouley another door will open and it was a great run!Thanks for the shout.Ben “Fear of Tigers” Berry!
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