Yahoo released the new beta version of MediaPlayer. There is a many improvements in this beta release, Here's the the excerpt from the release information:

«The interface between your document and our library is unobtrusive Javascript and semantic HTML: even though our library is Javascript internally, the API is HTML.

The API is fairly rich. You can set the image we use for album art. You can control the playlist sequence. You can tell us the song title. You can operate in strict mode or quirks mode. To learn more, see How To Link on the wiki.

We're creating a new generation of playlist technology by turning the page into a playlist. Our player knits all the songs in the page together so that they play one after the other. The result is continuous play within the hosting web page.

This is different from a badge in that we don't provide the content. It doesn't make sense for these to always be tied together.

It's different from a normal library in that users don't need to install their own copy. This makes it easier for users to adopt, and it allows us to do ongoing maintenance at web speed.

If you fool around with the player you'll find that you can click through to a Yahoo! search on the song title. This is a simple and unintrusive way to for us to monetize the traffic, and it keeps our business goals aligned with user needs because the search has to be adding value if we want people to use it.»

Luke Foust implemented some of Yahoo JavaScript controls :

We released version 2.2.0 of the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI) today. This release is one of the most substantial revisions we’ve done to the library since its inception. Leading the change manifest is a new versioning track and three brand-new YUI components:

New versioning, 0.12.2 —> 2.2.0:

YUI was released internally at Yahoo! about six months before it was released for public use under a BSD license in February 2006. Although the internal and external versions of the library were identical, the way we built and distributed them was different and we managed those differences with separate versioning tracks. Today we’re merging the internal and external project versioning and reaffirming that the YUI you can download here is exactly the same YUI Library used all across Yahoo!. Hence, we’re retiring the old public version series (which had reached 0.12.2) and we’re unifying the versioning of this release at v2.2.0.

Browser History Manager

Building desktop-style applications within web browsers — which were designed to read hyperlinked pages, not to run apps — has created many challenges. Not the least of these challenges involves handling "back/forward" navigation buttons and bookmarking. First, there’s the tough question about just what the back button or bookmark should do in your app to be consistent with your user’s intuition/expectation. Then there’s the question of how to make your desired implementation work across all the A-Grade Browsers. No one, as far as we know, has resolved the technical issues in a satisfactory way across the A-Grade. Today we’re releasing the YUI Browser History Manager, an experimental component that supports all A-Grade browsers in managing the back/forward button navigation and bookmarking for dynamic web pages. Stay tuned to YUIBlog for a deep-dive on Browser History Manager from its author, Julien Lecomte, later this week.

DataTable Control

YUI engineer Jenny Han Donnelly, who brought you the Logger and AutoComplete Controls, rolls out her third component today with the DataTable Control (beta). Tabular data is one of the most common UI presentation tasks. DataTable allows you to present tabular data and allow your user to engage that presentation by modifying/enhancing the data, sorting and searching through it, and adjusting the presentation itself (by, for example, changing column widths). DataTable’s debut featureset includes:

• Progressive enhancement: DataTable is built on the foundation of HTML table element markup, providing a solid progressive-enhancement path.
• Nested column headers
• Custom sort functions
• XHR data sources: Integration with Connection Manager offers robust support for pulling in off-page data.
• Inline editing: Contents of cells can be editable, allowing users to update the information they’re reviewing.

This is just our first release of the DataTable control, and we know that there are many possibilities for pushing this implementation further; we look forward to hearing your feedback in the YUI Forums about this release and what you’d like to see next.

???The JavaScript Programming Language,??? is publicly available on Yahoo! Video. In this presentation, which is meant to be the beginning of the three-course sequence (followed by ???Theory of the DOM??? and then ???Advanced JavaScript???), Douglas explores not only the language as it is today but also how the language came to be the way it is.

Aptana founder Paul Colton and CTO Ingo Muschenetz dropped by Yahoo yesterday for lunch and to talk about the Aptana IDE (which also functions as an Eclipse plugin. We asked Paul to sit down and give us a quick tour of Aptana, which was one of the first IDEs to feature rich code-completion and documentation integration for the YUI Library. We recorded this short (7 min.) webcast featuringing the highlights of the interface and its YUI support.

Related URLs:

• Aptana website, where you can download the IDE for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or as an Eclipse plugin
• Aptana.tv, where you???"?ll find a library of additional screecasts focusing on Aptana???"?s feature set