Yahoo! punts! mobile! development! platform!

'We're talking to Apple'

By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Mobile, 10th September 2008 20:16 GMT

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CTIA Wireless Yahoo! has unleashed a new incarnation of its Blueprint mobile development platform, providing a single environment for building standalone apps for Java, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices.

Previously, the Blueprint platform was merely a means of developing widgets that run atop Yahoo! Go, an application suite available for various and sundry mobile phones.

"Blueprint is our way to help us and the rest of the industry to develop mobile services," Yahoo! mobile president Marco Boerries said this morning, during his keynote at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment trade show in downtown San Francisco.

"You can write a Blueprint service, and with one click, you can generate a standalone application that runs on hundreds of Java devices, on Windows Mobile devices, on Symbian devices and that you can freely distribute. Never has it been so easy to build mobile applications that are this powerful."

If you care to refute this claim, you can download a developer preview here. A full commercial release will follow "later this year."

Boerries stressed that the platform is a "truly open and cross platform." But this goes only so far. Yahoo! itself used Blueprint to build its new oneConnect "social address book" for the Apple iPhone, but iPhone support isn't available to developers at large. "We're currently in discussions with Apple on how [we] can share our [iPhone-ready version of Blueprint] with you as well," he said.

Blueprint is also a means of building mobile web sites for standard html and xhtml browsers. ®

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