Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)

In the Wild for July 11, 2008

In the YUI world of late:

• The guy who started it all: Thomas Sha, the founder of the YUI project and the first frontend engineering manager at Yahoo, was at Adobe at the time of the AIR launch awhile back and they shot some video. If you’re curious to hear from the person who started YUI, here’s a rare chance (while notorious at Yahoo, Thomas does not spend a lot of time on the conference circuit).
  
• More YUIers in the wild: Andre Charland interviewed YUI CSS guru Nate Koechley for his InsideRIA podcast recently; frequent YUIBlog contributor Christian Heilmann from the Yahoo Developer Network spoke to the folks at The Guardian about his development philosophy, and Inside’s Paul Carvill has a writeup.
• Canvas graphing with a touch of YUI: Adam Detrick on 500null has a nice canvas-graphing example that makes use of YUI’s Dom Collection to build a progressively enhanced bar chart using inline tabular data.
• Ojay increments: James Coglan has updated his chaining library for YUI, Ojay, to 0.20. Writes James: “We have two new UI packages, Ojay.Overlay and Ojay.Paginator. Overlay gives you a bunch of classes for positioning content on top of the document, producing lightbox effects and the like, and Paginator implements the content slider effect that’s got a lot of attention recently, including the ability to lazy-load pages of content via Ajax, and easy integration with Ojay.History. Both packages come with a collection of events to allow your code to react to changes to the components, just like you would for DOM elements.” Dion has the full story on Ajaxian.
• Mighty parched over here…: Jenny Donnelly has worked hard on DataTable over the past year, and there’s nothing more gratifying to me than to see her work put to good use — in this case, providing us with the ability to sort Irish whiskeys by age (descending, naturally). Now, that’s worth pouring a Dungourney for. Cheers to David and the team.
• Maps+ FF Extension: Yahoo Maps is all YUI-based, and so is Rahim Sonawalla’s nifty YUI-based Maps+ Firefox extension. Like others in this category, Map+ allows you to highlight any address in a web page and map the address inline via a context menu.
• Dynamic dialogs with Rails and YUI: Eric Hedberg from Enleitened has posted his second in a series of posts about using YUI with Rails. This time he’s taking on dialogs. "In the last tutorial, we embedded a hidden form in a ’show’ view, so we could render a YUI Dialog instead of loading the edit page separately, or using a technique like in-place editing. While this is useful, I find it to be of somewhat limited utility. In this article I’ll demonstrate a technique to move that dialog to the index view using the YUI Connection Manager, so we can skip the show step all together."
• YUI template for Blogger: Will Stranathan posts on his Will at Home blog about implementing a YUI CSS-based Blogger template with full details on how to get this going on your own blog.
• YPulse from Trendics: Kent Johnson from Trendics posted his YUI-based solution for colored pulse alerts, YPulse: “Show a green highlight that fades away on a table row when a new record is added by a user. Add a pulsing yellow glow to a button you want the user to press next. With this open source YPulse library and YUI, both are easy to implement.”
• Website Speed Check: Also from Trendics, the new Website Speed Check tool tests the access time for your website (via a HTTP HEAD request) from locations around the US and reports them in a YUI DataTable. Can’t wait to see some Charts integration here.
  
• Marco van Hylckama Vlieg’s Dark Matter Theme for Pixelpost: Marco writes: "As much as I love Pixelpost, I found that one thing was lacking: a rock solid theme made with web development best practices in mind. I found some decent ones but nothing I really liked enough to put on my own site. Therefore I decided to roll my own and then make it available for all Pixelpost users to use." The result is the gorgeous Dark Matter theme. You can see it in action on Marco’s own photography site.
• Asvin Balloo’s JavaScript Text Magnifier: Writes Asvin regarding his magnifier: “The piece of code we will be writing, using the YUI library (my favorite), will allow users to increase/decrease their font size for a block of text, storing the font size in a cookie so that when they return to the page they don’t have to modify the font size again.” While Firefox 3 and Opera are starting to lead the way in full-page zooming, this trick is still a nice one for readers who can benefit from an adjustable font size.

As always, please help us out by letting us know in the comments what we’ve missed out there.

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