Yahoo! User Interface Blog

In the Wild for January 18

Here are some of the stories and happenings that have caught our eye since the last “In the Wild” post:

• YUI’s Nate Koechley on the TWiT Podcast: Over on the TWiT network’s “Free and Libre Open Source Software” (FLOSS) podcast, Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte had YUI’s Nate Koechley on as a guest to talk about YUI. It’s a great interview — astute questions and observations from the hosts, and of course Nate has been on the front lines talking about YUI since its inception.
  
• Final version of YUI-Based Lightbox on The Code Central: Cuong Tham’s Lightbox goes final; according to Cuong, “The most significant change in this version of the lightbox is that image thumbnails are no longer required for creating lightbox instance. That implies that you can create an image gallery without the presence of image thumbnails. The more exciting aspect of this new feature is that you can virtually grab any image from the internet and include it in your gallery.” Lots of positive feedback on his blog, where you’ll find download links and demo pages.
• YUI-based Loading Panel Widget: Cuong pours it on with another YUI adaptation, in this case a Loading Panel Widget. As always, he has it fully documented with all the code you need to get started.
  
• vBulletin 3.7 adds further YUI integration: If you’re a vBulletin user, the 3.7 release from late last year brings in fuller YUI integration and adds the ability to switch between local and Yahoo-hosted YUI files. Letting Yahoo host your YUI files can save you bandwidth and improve performance, so it’s great to see the vBulletin team exposing that as a simple configuration.
• MIT Timelines Mashup: Yahoo engineer Wally Punsapy put together this exploration of a rich timeline mashup and it’s currently an Editor’s Pick in the YUI section of Yahoo! Gallery. It’s more of a concept piece than a finished app, but it’s suggestive of the new breed of interactives that are maturing around APIs from companies like Flickr, Blogger, Youtube, Yahoo, Google and others.
• YUI CSS on Rails: John Munsch makes the case that Rails’ tight integration with Prototype is no reason not to use YUI CSS on your Rails app.
• Review of AutoComplete Widgets: I’ve long argued that AutoComplete is one of the most important client-side interactions to support in a JavaScript CSS library, so I was excited to see this article on Developer.com covering the implementation of AutoComplete in several libraries (including YUI). To ramp up on the YUI implementation, check out Jenny Han Donnelly’s User’s Guide and examples for YUI AutoComplete.
• Simple “show/hide” toggle with YUI: Lustr.nl has a nice codesnippet for a YUI-based show/hide toggle. From their post, “Within applications / websites you want to show and hide elements based on mouse clicks. Instead of defining each ‘toggle’ seperately you can use this toggle function. By adding a ‘rel’ attribute to a link you can define a toggle action. This toggle function also offers animation as an extra.”
• Qollage.com beta released: Online collage-creation site Qollage.com opened up a beta recently and there are numerous sample collages to explore. Qollage takes an aggressive approach to using rich interactions, with a dozen different YUI components included on the page.
  
• Notes on using onDOMReady: Michael James offers some useful notes about the use of onDOMReady (implemented in YUI and elsewhere) — and especially about some things to think about when use of onDOMReady fails at first blush to protect you from the dreaded “operation aborted” error in IE. (If you’re not familiar with onDOMReady, the tutorial text on this onDOMReady example might be of interest.)

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