Showing posts with label developers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label developers. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Yahoo's front page makeover

Yahoo has unveiled sweeping changes to its front page aimed at shoring up its position as the main portal to the web.

Consumers in the US are the first to benefit from a new, customisable format which lets them link to third parties like Google and Twitter.

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The new style will be introduced to parts of Europe and India later this week and Asia later in the year.

"We want to be at the centre of people's lives online," said Yahoo's consumer experiences head Tapan Bhat.

"There is a destination for everything you are about in just a click or two. Now we are looking at Yahoo holistically, all centred around the user," Mr Bhat told reporters in a conference call.

The key is personalisation and the biggest change involves a bar on the left hand side of the page, called My Favorites. Here, users can customise links to Yahoo and other services they use the most from news to social networks to email to movies.

While there are over 60 of these applications at the moment, consumers can add their own by typing in web addresses.

There are also plans to allow other software developers to design their own, more sophisticated applications that people can add.

"The new homepage is designed to make Yahoo the web's number one destination portal by once again giving people one place to access everything," said Ben Parr, associate editor of social media blog Mashable.com.

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Friday, July 17, 2009

Symbian to develop mobile apps

Symbian, the operating system on nearly half the world's smartphones, is to become involved in the development of mobile applications, or apps.

Symbian will be a one-stop location for app developers, standardising and testing software and then making it available to existing app storefronts.

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Called Horizon, the approach follows the lead set by other operating system makers such as Microsoft and Apple.

The not-for-profit Symbian Foundation will launch the service in October.

The announcement of Horizon follows Apple's statement on Tuesday that its App Store has seen 1.5 billion app downloads in a year, showing that a significant market exists for a centralised source of application software.

Handset manufacturers, mobile network operators and independent sites have opened their own application stores, but Horizon will aim to provide a centralised, smooth route to market to solidify Symbian's place in an increasingly crowded operating system market.

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