The Pipes team spent a hectic 24 hours as part of the recent internal Y! hack day (video coming soon) creating an iPhone interface for Pipes. We thought it was so useful we wanted to get it out as soon as possible. Now everyone can access their mash-ups while mobile by going to iphone.pipes.yahoo.com. In addition to running any of your pipes and getting the output in a suitably styled interface, one of the coolest parts of our hack was integrating Pipes with the built-in iPhone mapping application. You can put any of your geo Pipe results on the iPhone just by pressing the “Map” button:

So you can display results from Y! local, as well as answering the question posed by one of our more “urgent” Pipes: the restroom locator. Some other featured pipes that work well while mobile include Live Traffic Results (what exactly is causing that snarl up), and Price watcher - for those of us standing in Frys to work out if that really is a good deal…

We suggest tagging your pipes with “iphoneapp” so we can find and feature the best mobile mashups in the future.

We’ve added far more advanced searching, querying, and ranking capabilities to Pipes. Now you can find the types of Pipes that interest you by refining your search on a number of criteria, including the types of output they produce, what tags they have, what data sources they are mashing up, and in any combination! Pipes are also now ranked and sorted in a new way, allowing more “interesting” Pipes to appear earlier in each search.

Simply start searching in the usual way (type some text into the search box or hit “Browse”) and then you’ll get a list of attribute values down the left hand side of the page that are common to one or more of the search results. These values show you how many of the items in your search contain a particular tag, or access a certain data source, or output a given type of data and so on. Clicking on a particular value (e.g. the tag) will re-search and show only those items in your original search that also have that value. You can keep refining your search by adding more and more attribute values until you find the right Pipes. Refined too much? No problem, just go to the “Current Search” box and click on the “x” next to that value to stop restricting the results that way.

When there are more than 10 values for an attribute they become hidden. Press “More +” to the right of the attribute name (e.g. Tag, or Source) to show them all.

While every release of Pipes fixes many bugs, we don’t often talk about them. However the latest Pipes update addresses one of the biggest problems reported on the message boards and now Pipes supports a wider diversity language encodings and character sets found in many feeds. We still have a few remaining types to nail down but many more feeds should now work well.

Another frequently requested enhancement finally arrives on the Regex module, now our power users (you know who you are) can make use of the “m” “i” “g” and “s” flags.

We’ve also enabled run counting - yes, finally they’re back! We’ve re-counted all those hanging chads, errr, runs, and updated the statistics on each Pipe. Take a look at your Pipes and see how popular they have been.

Fed up with that avatar? You can now use any picture or yourself so other developers can see how pretty you really are. You can change your picture without even leaving your Pipes page:

On Monday, October 22nd, Pipes will be offline for approximately 1 1/2 hours starting at 9:00 PM PST. We’ll be performing a routine, scheduled update (lookout for some cool new stuff and fixes on Tuesday). We expect regular service to return by around 10:30 PM PST. Click here to find out what time the site will be offline where you are located.

An unexpected hiccup means that we won’t be having any schedule downtime tonight.

On Wednesday, October 17th, Pipes will be offline for approximately 1 1/2 hours starting at 9:00 PM PST. We’ll be performing a routine, scheduled update and expect regular service to return by around 10:30 PM PST. Click here to find out what time the site will be offline where you are located.