Flickr has an open and very powerful API that's been around since 2004. Five years later, developers have built an enormous number of great apps and cool toys for Flickr. Now you can browse and discover Flickr apps in one central location, the new App Garden. Apps in the garden range from stats to importing/exporting to integration with other sites.

Although Flickr has chosen some featured apps to display prominently on the front page, any developer can submit to the App Garden. The Garden itself isn't the only place apps are being promoted around Flickr. On each photo page, along with the info you regularly see, you'll now see which app the photographer used to upload the image - as long as it's an app has already been submitted and listed by Flickr. If you're a developer, you have plenty of incentive to submit your app, and if you're a Flickr power user, you'll definitely want to check out what's already been posted.

[via Flickr Blog]

Wolfram Alpha was hyped as better than Google for finding certain info, especially in the areas of math and science computation, but the hype died down a bit when people realized that it was finicky and a bit tricky to use. Wolfram Alpha hasn't gone away, though. In fact, they've just announced an API for developers and a new iPhone app. It's quite possible that third-party applications harnessing the power of Wolfram Alpha might prove more popular than the engine itself.

The iPhone app, due to be released soon, is sort of a demonstration of what developers can do with the API. It should be a big improvement on the iPhone-optimized version of the Wolfram Alpha site. It will be interesting to see what uses developers find for Wolfram Alpha, because the problem with the site is that it requires more specific, more complex search queries than most users are going to bother with. Third-party apps could narrow those queries down, and direct users toward some of the things Wolfram Alpha does really well.

[via Mashable]

Microsoft's Popfly, a place to create games and game mashups, closed down on August 24. Although all the site's users lost their accounts, Popfly is far from completely dead. Microsoft has open-sourced the code and put it up on CodePlex, free to be used by any aspiring game makers out there.

Of course, features that depend on the now-defunct site, like high scores, aren't included, but someone ambitious could host them in the future. On the Popfly page at CodePlex, the developers have left some suggestions for directions people could take with the code:

• *Example code for a simple, general purpose Silverlight game engine
• Create a Silverlight 3 scene / actor / behavior editor for the data format and make new games
• Porting the engine to run your games on other platforms, like XBox 360 or Zune via XNA Game Studio or client PC via WPF
• Building a copy of the game engine to use with your game data to post on your website.
• Fix multi-actor collision resolution and make Lots O' Peas go faster!
• Add new features like grid-based terrain, dialog trees, etc
  

I'm not sure how likely it is that any of this will actually get done, but there have to be some coders out there with time on their hands.


[via OStatic]

With the first Firefox 3.6 alpha in the bag, what's the next logical step for Mozilla to take? Why, to roll out the first pre-alpha of version 3.7, of course.

Sure, the 3.6 alpha 2 is still labeled Minefield, but why not go for maximum danger factor with your bleeding-edge install?

The 3.7 interface hasn't yet started to look like the mockups we saw a little while ago. Glass support isn't built in and the UI elements are still the same as those in 3.5, and the standalone search box is still there (appearance in my screenshot is different due to my previously modified 3.6 install). I've only been using it for a few minutes, obviously, but it feels as stable as the 3.6 alpha so far. It's also pretty damn speedy and easy on ram.

Head-to-head against Chrome 3.0.197.11 in Futuremark's Peacekeeper, 3.7 came up short - posting a score 19% lower. In actual use, though, I don't notice a substantial difference. Responsiveness is actually better than Chrome, which has suffered intermittent sluggishness over the past few days.

As with any new Minefield build, you're probably not going to be able to use some of your go-to add-ons and favorite themes. To take it for a spin, head over to the Mozilla FTP and download it.

Share your impressions in the comments!

Yep, time to fire up the code editor of your choice and get crackin' on that explosive "app market" the mobile space is all abuzz about. It seems Palm finally had enough of the paltry offerings in their App Catalog for the Pre and opened the SDK and documents to any fool crazy enough to write a list app, tip calculator, etc.

Palm's blog post about this momentous occasion offers some dates for webOS meetups and conferences, handy if you're trying to get up to speed fast. Or, you can go straight to the Palm developer center, cleverly called webOSdev (camel caps, radical!) and get the SDK and documents yourself.

While I am clearly dubious of Palm's efforts, coming late to a party they practically started and having failed so many times before (and in some of the most spectacular ways ever seen in consumer electronics), in the end I really am hoping they can nurture a strong application environment. Choice is good, and Palm still has a lot going for it. I also hope the developers for Pre find what they are looking for. Will their app catalog burst with over 50,000 apps in a year? Time will tell.

What apps would you write for webOS?

The folks at Mozilla decided it was time someone started up a central repository for all of the great open web development resources out there, and the result is an extremely useful site called the Open Web Tools Directory. It's full of frameworks, library, SDKs, and anything else you might need to make your web app easier to build. The eclectic mix includes popular powerhouses like jQuery and Google Web Toolkit, but it also has debugging tools and ways to generate favicons.

The directory is laid out as a series of scattered icons on a space-themed background. It looks cool, and utilizes the capabilities of the latest browsers, but there's no "view as list" option as yet. There are some ways to find what you;re looking for, though: category tabs can be turned on and off to limit your browsing, and there's a basic search. It would be nice to see a more detailed information display for each tool you click on, but the directory is off to a good start. It's nowhere near complete, though, so add your own favorite web dev tools to the list if you don't see them there already.

According to Facebook's Developer Blog, big changes are coming to the application directory, which will affect both developers and everyday users. With over 52,000 apps now available, the Facebook team, they're looking at new ways to highlight the best apps and help users discover the ones most relevant to them. This should deliver a much-needed image boost for Facebook, and help combat the impression that Facebook apps are all cheap pirates-vs-ninjas spam.

The plan includes verified apps, which developers can have vetted by Facebook for a fee. The ones that meet Facebook's standards will be bumped to the top of search results in the app directory. This looks like a win-win, where Facebook gets money, developers get more exposure, and users get better apps.

Also, users will now see an activity feed on the app directory page, showing which apps their friends have used lately, hopefully leading to more relevant results. The application categories are also getting their first reboot since '07, making finding the best apps that much easier.

If you don't want to wait for these changes to start finding the most useful apps on Facebook, you can always check out my top 10 list on Download Squad.

[via Webware]

Last month Grant, Christina and I checked out a couple of screencasts from Pragmatic Programmers' Bill Dudney. Specifically, we watched "Coding in Objective-C 2.0." We took a look at part one mostly, which is an introduction to the Objective-C syntax and structure, culminating in a basic application. Part two covers memory management in depth. Since then they've added a part 3 on debugging, and the plan is to continue adding more. Part one covers classes, objects and messages and, like the other portions in the series, costs $5. One thing I love about Pragmatic Programmers is that they offer a wide choice of formats, including versions tuned for iPhone viewing and Theora Ogg format.

It's important to note that while Objective-C is the language you'll use for iPhone development, these screencasts alone won't make you an iPhone developer. For one, there are differences in memory management on the iPhone versus desktop apps (iPhone apps don't do garbage collection). Also, iPhone interactions require the use of Cocoa Touch, and that isn't covered in these. If you are looking to move from another OOP language to Objective-C, however, this is a great way to get started. Plus, you really need to understand Obj-C to make solid iPhone apps. The side bonus is that you will also be able to write Mac desktop apps.

These screencasts are particularly useful if you are an audio-visual learner and have some background in programming. Don't expect to come up to speed if you have a slight understanding of a basic scripting language. That said, these are very clearly explained and the structure is great. If you watch the videos and do the exercises, I have little doubt you'll be learning the basics of Objective-C in no time. Listen to the audio as we discuss who these are for and what could be done better.

When you back up your iPhone or iPod Touch, iTunes can use the backup to do a restore, but not much else. It's nice when Apple's stuff "just works," but what if you want to see inside the black box and interact with the data on your phone? This is especially important for developers, who can fix bugs a lot more easily if they can look at a user's backup to figure out what's causing problems with an app. iPhone Backup Extractor is a tool that makes this possible.

With iPhone Backup Extractor, you can convert an iPhone/iPod Touch backup to make it readable by the OS X Finder. This lets developers get access to application resources that there's no way to see in iTunes. It might be of some interested to curious non-developers, too, if you just to figure out what files a 3rd-party app has created on your phone.

[via furbo.org]

Ahh... nothing like the sweet smell of website glitches in the morning. The web development junkies here at Download Squad know how it feels to spend hours tracking down stubborn CSS styles that have managed to magically disappear, or have cascaded themselves into places where no man has gone before. We can attest to debugging JavaScript into the wee hours of the night, and trying to get rid of that one extra pixel of whitespace at the bottom of the page until we give up and hope nobody notices.

If the above description fits a lot of your day-to-day activities, and you're a Firefox user, Firebug, something we covered a couple years ago in its infancy, is the extension for you. When we last looked at it, Firebug was a basic JavaScript console with a DOM inspector. However, since then, it's had a couple of layout changes, and has been given features that changed Firebug from a simple developer console to a powerful tool for all aspects of web development.

Since it was revealed that Apple's recently-announced .mac replacement, MobileMe, was partially built on something called SproutCore, the buzz around this hot new JavaScript framework has been growing. Although this is the first that many people will have heard about it, SproutCore has actually been around for a while, powering services like .mac's Mobile Galleries. Now it's getting so much attention that SproutCore.com has been unreachable all day, a week after the WWDC announcement.

So, why SproutCore? Daniel Eran Dilger, over at RoughlyDrafted, has a great rundown of things to love about this open source JavaScript framework: it will allow developers to build web apps that look more like desktop apps, function offline, and take advantage of modern browser features. Apple's using SproutCore to build a front end for WebDav and its own WebObjects, but other developments could easily add PHP, JSON or XML data to the mix, to name a few.

[via RoughlyDrafted]

It's hard to get by with just one chat client these days. Your contacts aren't likely to be limited to a single service, like Google Talk, MSN Live or AIM, so a multi-chat client is a must. Now the multi-chat experience is about to get a lot better for AIM's 27.8 million users, with the launch of AOL's Open AIM 2.0 initiative.

Open AIM will aid the developers of clients like Meebo and eBuddy by releasing documentation for OSCAR, the protocol that the official AIM client uses to connect to the service. Open source libraries are now allowed to access the AIM network, and developers are free to create mobile or corporate versions of AIM to their heart's content, and AIM will now all kinds of widgets and plugins.

What does this mean for users? For one, some of the compatibility issues with third-party clients might finally go away -- file transfer is the one that's always been a sore spot for us. AOL is promising access to AIM's voice and video capabilities, too. Keep an eye out for updates to your favorite chat client, because the devs are likely working at full speed to add new features under Open AIM.

[Via TechCrunch]

While we're not particularly used to hearing the words "free" and "Microsoft" in the same sentence, the software behemoth does offer a number of free utilities for download on its website. For example, there's SyncToy, Power Toys for XP, and Photo Story. Now Microsoft is also offering free downloads of its commercial developer tools. The only catch? You need to be a student in college or graduate school.

The programs available include:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio 2.0
• XNA Creators Club Online

Students can download full versions of these applications. They aren't limited versions of the full software like Microsoft Accounting Express. The promotion, which Microsoft is calling DreamSpark is available to any student no matter what their area of study. But right now the deal is only good in 11 countries: the US, UK, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Belgium.

You'll need a Windows Live ID to participate. And Microsoft will take steps to verify that you're really a student, so you need to enter the name of the school or institution that can confirm your status before you can download your program.

[via TechCrunch]