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when Andy Pealting sold BuddyPress to Automattic (makers of WordPress) a month ago, buddypress.org went into maintenance-mode. now that Andy had a chance to bundle the code into a handy SVN-repository, the site is back up again, giving every developer the chance to toy with BuddyPress. But what’s BuddyPressm you might ask?

BuddyPress will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform.

BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, each plugin adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact.

got it?:) [note, this won't work with your typical Wordpress-install, it's for WordPress MU only!]

(more…)

• A VC: Biz Stone on Read/Write Talk -
• MySpace: How To Devalue a Platform in Three Easy Steps - SWiK -
• Going Viral like the Common Cold (Not Always a Good Thing) -
• MMOGCHART.COM -
• GigaOM A First-Hand Look at a Chinese Second Life, HiPiHi « -
• Retro MacOS Theme -

back from holiday (sort of), I’ve been toying with the Facebook-API and built my first tiny little application today. it simply fetches Hugh MacLeod’s latest cartoon from gapingvoid.com and renders it on your profile.

if you want to install Gaping Void to your profile, the application-link is apps.facebook.com/gapingvoid - enojy!

• 5 Facebook Application Gotchas | 20bits
• Facebook Developers | Resources
• Facebook Developers | Documentation
• Facebook Developers | FAQ
• Facebook Developers | Resources
• Spock
• Welcome to Scrybe
• Facebook Application Development - First Steps

on July 6th-8th, Adobe is hosting iPhoneDevCamp in San Francisco, a BarCamp-styled gathering “to develop web-based applications and optimize web sites for iPhone. It is a non-commercial event, organized by volunteers, with attendance free to all. By the completion of the weekend event, a number of iPhone-ready web applications and web sites will be launched to the public.”. more than 120 developers have already signed up, temporarily establishing the most highest iPhone/person-density on the globe there’s also some sweet irony since Adobe is hosting the event while their Flash (Lite)-platform initially won’t be supported by iPhone.

The University of Washington’s Emerging Technology group published a few key-facts and guidelines for web-application developers targetting the upcoming iPhone, including User-Agent-string, javascript-limitations and user-interface conventions. No specific info yet on the Javascript(?)-hooks Safari will offer to make phone-calls or control the integrated Google Maps-client, but a good list of things to keep in mind…

update: since the original page has been taken down by Apple’s request (one really has to wonder why…), here’s the cached document.

YouTube’s API - basically a read-only set of RSS-feeds and XML/RPC-calls - currently doesn’t support scripted upload or download of videofiles. My quick hack PHPTube offers this featureset in a cleanly encapsulated PHP-class. Special interest goes to the upload-functionality, which virtually allows the integration of YouTube as a video-storage-backend into any other web-app. And while there are several download-scripts out there on the web, I’ve yet to find another uploader.

I’ve originally built PHPTube for using it within PLAY.FM (talking about automated upload of video-footage from our live radio-broadcasts), but since these things take some time I’ld love to hear if anyone out there has some use for my script…a simple digg would do as well

Warning: due to changes in the YouTube’s HTML, all versions prior 0.1.6 are obsolete!

Download: PHPTube 0.1.6 (fixed bug in getLast())
Requirements: PHP, PEAR/HTTP

Attention: If you’re looking for PEAR, goto http://pear.php.net/ and read http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.getting.php!

Ports: Java-port of PHPTube (by James Schopp), Python-Port (by Sylvain Boily), Joomla-Plugin (download-only, by Mohamad Ballouk) - thx!

Using PHPTube? Consider a donation, to keep things rolling…thanks!

Google Code Blog announces the launch of the Google Developer Podcast (subscribe here), covering:

• Interviews with Google engineers, discussing areas of their expertise
• New features, applications, and APIs that matter to developers
• Open source projects that we work on and/or care about at Google
• Projects that use our APIs and applications in interesting ways
• News and events that we all care about, including the Google Summer of Code.

Joyent Slingshot is another competitor fighting Adobe Apollo on the on/offline webapp-market. Slingshot promises to deploy Ruby-on-Rails apps & data synchronisation to Windows & Mac-desktops by april 2007. considering Rails’ popularity among web2.0-folks, this might be worth checking out (although it’s not really clear under which kind of license Singshot will operate).

according to Read/WriteWeb, Firefox 3 will offer support for running web-applications offline. though it’s not yet clear on which level this might happen, this is major news for providers of service-based web-software. the biggest advantage of online-apps - using them on any device with net-access with no need to sync data - is at the same time their worst caveat - when connectivity goes down, so do online-apps and all data stored within them (that’s why it is a good idea even for fulltime Gmail-users to backup their mail via POP3).

of course, Firefox isn’t alone in trying to move web-apps offline - Adobe’s Apollo framework promotes offline-services on top of their successful Flash-platform. Flash has bee used to store data in a local cache for quite a time, as it has been the only cross-browser solution besides storing (mini-chunks of) data within cookies (Niall Kennedy gives a good overview on various methods of storing data locally). applications like Scrybe (private beta) let us anticipate the way future online/offline-apps might look&feel.

besides Adobe, several open source projects are working on solutions for the offline-dilemma: the Dojo Offline Project and POW (Plain Old Webserver) both implement a proxy http-server for running local copies of web-applications. while Dojo Offline isn’t available yet, POW - a firefox plugin (which means basically a web-server implemented in Javascript!) - is ready for download.

naturally, existing web-apps require heavy modification to work with any of the mentioned offline-approaches, meaning we still have to wait for real-life apps leveraging the benefits of going offline.