Tag: API

One feature I really like about Flock 3 is the fact that it displays my activity stream in a sidebar. While Flock is -- like Google Chrome -- based on the Chromium source code, that particular feature was coded from scratch by Flock's develoepers because there is no sidebar functionality in Chrome. Not yet at least. Work is underway, however, on building sidebars into Chrome's extension API. ...

What do you get when you release a Linux-based SDK for Skype? Skype on practically every mobile handset, and even some weird electronic devices, I hope! Instead of relying on Skype and Skype's APIs, developers and device manufacturers can use the new SkypeKit SDK to build their own Skype apps. The SDK goes far beyond the APIs that have been publicly available thus far, and looks a lot like ...

Spotify, the (European) king of music-on-demand, is a real pain in the ass to actually use. I mean, it works, but only just. It's one of those annoying apps that minimises itself to your system tray -- and while that might be OK with Windows XP, on Windows 7 that's just crap. I want Spotify on my SUPERBAR! I want the ability to stop, start and change tracks without having to dig Spotify out of my ...

One of Google's biggest strengths is its ability to make predictions based on data. If you're a developer with a bunch of data, and you want to harness the freakishly-accurate predictive powers of Google, there's now an API for that. Google's Prediction API analyzes patterns in your data to do things like generating product recommendations, sorting email, routing messages, or identifying ...

With the ramifications for end-users out of the way, I can now focus on the interesting bits -- the technology behind Froyo (Android 2.2) that makes it so damn exciting. First, the underlying operating system (or virtual machine) now features a just-in-time (JIT) compiler. Claims of 2- to 5-times faster performance over Android 2.1 were touted but the actual demonstration showed a gain of about ...

Typography on the web is a major source of difficulty for designers today. There are so few "web-safe" fonts, and there's no standard way to bring new ones into the equation. Well, Google has taken a big step toward addressing that problem, by introducing an open source font library, and an API that makes it easy to use the new fonts on your own webpage. That means that along with Georgia, ...

[Update] As Michael points out in the comments, I neglected to mention that Appigo has worked out a deal with Toodledo to offer a free for 6 months Toodledo PRO account to all affected customers. Remember the Milk, if you're not familiar with it, is a very popular web-based task management application that we've frequently covered here at Download Squad. In fact, I've been a big supporter of ...

Surprisingly, I don't think we've covered text-to-speech here on Download Squad before -- at least not in the browser! Perhaps that's because it's a bit chicken-and-egg: for a blind person to find out about a text-to-speech add-on, he would need the add-on. Damn paradoxes. Anyway, I had a play with two solutions today, both based on vozMe's text-to-speech API. The first is a Firefox add-on ...

If you don't have Dropbox yet, where have you been? We've raved about this awesome cloud-based storage service before, and now Dropbox's mobile offerings are expanding in a big way. The Dropbox Mobile API was just released, along with apps for Android and iPad. This new push is called Dropbox Anywhere, and it's great news for users. With the new mobile API, developers will be able to write ...

You've no doubt heard of Facebook's new Graph API. It doesn't expose more information per se, rather it makes it much easier to parse, collate and thus search through user info. The new API is so easy and unrestricted that you can just make an anonymous Facebook account, visit the API documentation and... that's it! Then make a simple site like this, plug in any Facebook username -- and see what ...

It seems that, in a glorious case of thinly-veiled and slightly-obfuscated smackdown, Apple's new iPhone OS 4 SDK Developer Agreement outlaws cross-compiled applications, such as those made with Adobe's new Packager for iPhone Flash-to-iPhone compiler. The new legalese reads: 3.3.1 - Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any ...

PayPal had a nice booth at SXSW and was there to promote their API and developer platform, which now allows developers (hint: mobile developers, prayers answered) to enable PayPal's e-commerce solution within their apps. They were also there promoting their new iPhone app, which allows you to manage your PayPal account and send money to merchants or friends. Here's my chat with Francesco ...

We already knew Google Gears was on its way out, but Google has now basically lowered the casket into the ground. Gears powered a bunch of web apps in its day, but now Google's stopping work on it and switching to supporting its features natively in Chrome using HTML5 and other emerging web standards. What does this mean for current Gears users? Well, support will be severely limited, but ...

By now, everyone knows that Foursquare and Gowalla are locked in a battle to become the number one location-based check-in game, with Yelp and (maybe) Facebook threatening to upset the balance. Well, Gowalla just leveled the playing field with Foursquare a little bit by introducing the first public version of the Gowalla API. That means developers can now build cool apps on top of Gowalla's data, ...

If you're looking to implement a secure, private chat environment in your company, have a look at what's going on at Ignite Realtime with their OpenFire real time collaboration server and Spark cross-platform IM client. Being that they are open source, both OpenFire and Spark are free; that makes it easy to convince management to give it a try. But the open source nature of the products also ...