Just a heads-up for feed subscribers since this is on our homepage: we're running a mashup contest this month. Build and share a Proto app. Two days later we'll post it on our website for voting. The builder of app that gets the most votes wins an iPod Nano. Details here. See and vote on the submissions here.
In a move of awesomeness, the guys over at Dapper have decided to give $200 iTunes Music Store Gift Certificates to any winners of the Daily Proto iPod Contest that use Dapps. Here's an example Proto app that uses Dapper to get hard drive prices from Pricewatch into Proto.
I spent some time over the weekend playing with Yahoo! Pipes since I didn't really get a chance to last week. It looks pretty cool, and it's great to see that more and more people are starting to believe that non-programmers can build their own apps if they have the right tools.
Searching and browsing Craigslist using Proto and Yahoo! Pipes:
Here’s a YouTube video walking through the application and the Yahoo! Pipes tool:
(There’s a higher resolution version of the video on our website.)
Back in the old days, desktop data used to be the only data that mattered. Sure, big IT departments had enterprise databases, but there was no way for a user on the front lines to make spreadsheets play with internet data sources.
The good news is that web services are changing all that. The even better news is that Proto has partnered with StrikeIron, the world’s largest marketplace of commercial web services, to provide seamless access to their extensive catalog.
Need to prioritize a sales leads spreadsheet by validating email addresses and phone numbers? How about calculate sales tax for an order or send an SMS? These services and more are available now for one-step use, including complete documentation, from the Component Library.
We’re quickly expanding our coverage of StrikeIron’s services, so stay tuned for regular rollouts of rich new web service functionality. In the mean time, don’t hesitate to make requests on our forums for those most valuable to you.
We're going to be presenting, so if you're going, let's hang out.
