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uploadr is a demo of Yahoo’s upcoming BrowserPlus and it looks amazing. When you install the browser extension, developers get access to features usually not available in browsers. Such as drag-and-drop from the operating system and browsing-for-multiple-files. That should some on handy. And I want it for 23. Now.

Now the question though: What do I do with those files? How do I transfer them from the user’s computer to my server? According to the current list of services, that isn’t on the menu for version one. From the demos it seems that the only way to actually use the dropped or browsed files is through Ruby (on which a FlickrUploader corelet is based). Weird. It’s nice to see Yahoo trying to compete with Google on openness and extensibility, but am I the only one seeing a big black whole in the service offerings here?

The Notify service look interesting as well. Too bad that it’s text based only. I’d love be able to show recently uploaded photos to interested people visiting 23. Or buddy icons when people post on twitter. Or … [Update: Even better. There's a Yahoo logo on popup notifications in Growl.]

It’s sunday and I’ve been looking for something reasonable to do while not actually working. So I though I’d address an issue we’ll be having at 23 within the next month or so. We want to let people choose their language from a drop-down select box, and we want each option in this box to have a flag icon representing the language. Such specific styling isn’t doable through plain HTML, so custom code is needed…

(We’re certainly not the first to address this issue, and a lot of people have begun to include custom select boxes in their web applications. Most notable in this crowd is Google in Google Reader and Gmail.)

I’m still a few hours from a result that’s usable in the real life, but the first prototype demonstrates where I’m going. Already the JavaScript and the accompanying stylesheet is well-commented, but since it seems like a great example of advanced web scripting in action I’ll be back with a detailed walk-through soon.

» See it in action

It’s nice to see Google entering the scene for easy chart building — along with Yahoo’s Chart library and new JavaScript/Canvas-based stuff like Ole Laursen’s Flot. Frankly, I’ve been postponing doing a pretty chart based reporting tool for Nosco’s prediction markets for quite a while now (we do build nice charts for the web app though) but all of this could be becoming easier.

I’m still not jumping deliriously up and down. My first experiments with YUI Charts were mixed, and for everything it lets you do there’s two or three things out of reach. The same thing probably goes for Google’s hosted solution and it’s worth approaching the service with a bit of skepticism.