Dave Balmer

Well played, Yahoo. Well played.

I’ve been holding off on a deep dive of YUI 3, but with Hack Day 2008 and a chance to corner various YUI folks this week, I figured it was a good time to load up with intelligent questions.

Right off, I’m very impressed with the configurator. It lets you cherry-pick the bits you want for your app, then it sorts out dependancies, and hands you an url for minified, roll-up API goodness. It even gives you a pie-chart breakdown of where your download is spent across API modules.

The new node and event model is intriguing, and I plan on playing with this pre-release API quite a bit.

Wow, time has been flying by at my new gig. Hopefully I’m not too late to get in for Hack Day, cause it’s a hell of a lot of fun. I haven’t been rubbing elbows with my Yahoo friends in forever, so hopefully a few familiar faces will be there. It’s September 12-13 at the Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale. See ya there!

I was looking some months back at the “Hot” iPhone Web apps, and was amused to find the “iPhone Flashlight” and, later, the various strobe lights and other things which basically set the background color from #000 to #FFF. Not to be outdone, I made the iPhone SOS app one night which used the same “high tech” approach to make Morse Code signals. Then I chuckled, showed a few friends who also chuckled, and I promptly forgot about it.

If you want to preview it, you’ll probably need Safari or Firefox because I’m too lazy to fiddle with IE for something this small and specialized. So point your iPhone to the URL, bookmark it, and use it in cases where all other forms of communication break down:

mtskull.com/sos

Tap the three screen keys (dot, dash and space) to hand-key your code, or tap the input box on the top and key something in using the iPhone text input. Tap “send” and signal that special someone across the crowded room, or call for help in a remote area with no cell phone coverage. You can also play party games with it, learn Morse code by trial and error, or just marvel at the latest thing in wireless communications. Options let you set the color of your light and the speed which it sends your messages.

Let me know if you come up with any other interesting uses for this thing.

I haven’t really played with the “Wii” much since we got it last year, and only recently enabled the built-in wifi, so this sweet news viewer has been lurking in my living room for quite a while.

Spin the globe and see news story pages pile up on cities where they happen. Zoom in, and the piles break up into several smaller stacks. The whole interface is fun, smooth and delightful (a user interface cliche that I tend to eschew in favor of less emphatic adjectives, like “cool” and “neat”).

Out-of-browser experiences like this are getting better. Aside from the mild annoyance of downloading some specialized client, the end result is often worth it. Another one I was turned on to recently is CoolIris. It’s a downloadable that turns YouTube and your photo streams into a more channel-like experience. Very interesting.

I was all prepared to give a dismissive, sarcastic review of this gadget, but the silly thing is good. Not only has everyone in the family used and enjoyed it, but it’ll even support my weight. And that’s no small feat.

In case you’ve missed the ads, web promotion and signs in most metro areas, the “WiiFit” is a new personal fitness and training system for the Wii. Basically, it’s part aerobic step, part scale and part video game.

Setting it up is easy. You pop in the included AA bateries, and synch it just like a WiiMote. Then set it down, turn it on and pop in the game disc.

The WiiFit focuses on balance and core training. Every exercise so far has some element of balance and weight distribution built-in. Sections include yoga, aerobics, strength training and balance games. Yes, yoga. My friend Rand would be quite pleased to see me trying to balance my bulk and practice deep breathing and graceful-yet-mildly-uncomfortable poses.

Also built in is a daily body test, which uses BMI and balance exercises along with your age to compute your “WiiFit Age”. After three days, I’ve gone from 45 to 41. Not bad, except for the fact that I’m really 37. But that’s fine, because there’s also a built in nag system to encourage, praise and even chastise my ups and downs. Mildly annoying, but generally effective.

The thing really shines in a family or group of friends, because you can watch and encourage each other as well. Actually, more like shame and ridicule each other, but I think that depends on the group dynamic. Either way, feedback from other people who are doing the same thing is a major plus.

And the thing actually works. We all went crazy with it the first day, spending about an hour apiece trying to unlock new activities, and get better scores on the ones we had. It was fun! The next day everyone — and I mean even the fit 12 year old — were feeling some sore spots from the previous day’s workout. After some groaning and sharing our various aches and pains, someone popped WiiFit back on, and away we all went all over again. Each day since has been the same, but with a little less griping the next day.

Go get one of these. It costs about what you’d pay for a boring night on the town, and is a heck of a lot better for you.