Geekery ahead.
I really love Adobe’s new social app, kuler, built around creating, tagging, and sharing color themes. The interface is gorgeous, and the ability to download themes into Photoshop and Illustrator is a great feature.
However, as a social app, kuler is not very social. It exists completely as a Flash application, and there are no features that allow the sharing of information created in the kuler space with anything outside it. At the least, I wanted an RSS feed of my themes that I could aggregate on DELICIOUSLYMETA.
Based on some information gleaned from a blog comment by a kuler employee, I installed the excellent network tool WireShark (née Ethereal) and started watching the traffic between the Flash app and Adobe’s servers.
Sure enough, kuler uses a REST-style API based on http calls t the server that return XML documents representing the data. I’ve first wrote some PHP code to test it, and then started documenting the API at http://deliciouslymeta.com/kuler/. I’ve only got the basics documented yet, but over time I’ll get more of it down. At some point I hope to be able to offer RSS feeds for a user’s themes.
My goal in this project is not to “hack’ Adobe’s cool new app, but to show how the API model they use is actually a great foundation for a social app. Hopefully they will publicize and document the API in the near future and this experiment will be obsolete.
Cool, man. That sounds like a lot of fun. Anything involving hack^H^H^H^Hwatching network traffic is fun. Gotta love Ethereal... er... WireShark.