Posted on December 6, 2007 - by Justin Hartman

The Times launches Planet Apps

It’s been a busy few weeks for me but none more than this current week. It seems as if all my efforts the last month or so have all come to a head and I’m pleased to announced the new Planet Apps portal for The Times. Planet Apps is a new site that will house all our online applications and we’ve started this portal with one new website and two Facebook applications.

TimesURL is a port of my Tiny Link project and when I showed the guys here what I did with Tiny Link everyone was impressed. After some planning we decided to port that site to the Avusa stable.

TimesURL has a cool new interface, thanks to Colin’s design skills, and we’ll be rolling this out into the newspaper as well as in other projects we have planned for next year. The integration between online and the newspaper is now seamless and we can direct people reading the paper to the exact location online with a simple 25 character url.

Prior to joining The Times we decided that a Facebook app was on the cards and it’s been on my list of todos for some time. On Tuesday I decided to finally look into doing an application for Facebook and by the end of the day I had completed two.

Developing for the Facebook API was much easier than I thought it would be and while the Facebook Markup Language took a little getting used to I’ve now got the hang of it all.

Our two new applications we have for Facebook include a News and Multimedia application. Here’s a quick breakdown of functionality for each:

News App: Displays a list of the latest news from The Times on your profile page. There is also a new icon in your left-hand navigation and when you click on it you are taken to a canvas page with all the latest news items and a blurb for each.

Multimedia App: The Multimedia application also displays on your profile page but you can actually view the latest video direct from your profile. Clicking on the Times icon in the left-hand navigation bar brings up a detailed page showing you all our latest multimedia with descriptions and images.

I’m really happy to be seeing some of our projects go live because it’s been a long time coming! Head on over to Planet Apps now and see what we’ve been up to.