Kuler Api Testing Continued

December 1, 2006

Slug: kuler-api-testing-continued Date: 2006-12-01 Title: kuler API testing continued layout: post

Adobes Kuler Api Exposed

Slug: adobes-kuler-api-exposed Date: 2006-11-30 Title: Adobe’s kuler API exposed layout: post 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 . 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.