Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)

In the Wild for May 11, 2009

News and notes from the YUI community in the past couple of weeks. Please use the comments to let us know what we missed.

• Satyen Desai Talks YUI3 on WebDevRadio: Satyen (one of the key developers on the YUI3 project) gave a talk today at JSConf, and WebDevRadio interviewed him afterwards.  You can catch the interview here.
  
• Matt Snider’s New YUI-based Card Game Engine: The prolific Matt Snider weighs in with a new project.  Writes Matt: “The goal of this system is to build a set of easy to extend, MVC JavaScript objects that can be used as the backbone of any card-game system. I will be tackling solitaire card games first, and have developed the card management architecture, but haven’t even begun to design the game architecture.  The card architecture consists of three objects: Deck, CardModel, CardView. The ‘Deck’ object will handle a collection of cards and has methods to add or remove cards, and a shuffle method using the Knuth algorithm. Games are played by interacting with the ‘Deck’ object and a developer would extend the object to meet the needs of their game.”  Check out the blog post and demo.
  
• YUI Implemented on Fashion/celebrity Blog Limelife.com: Fashion and celebrity blog Limelife is using a variety of YUI components, including Gopal Venkatesan’s YUI Carousel Control. 
  
• Retrevo.com Electronics Site Using YUI AutoComplete and More: Retrevo is a consumer electronics site designed to help you make good decisions about your electronics purchases.  It also has a fantastic repository of users’ manuals — a handy thing for checking out a product that you’re considering buying, or to learn more about one that you already own.  Retrevo uses a variety of YUI components, including Jenny Donnelly’s AutoComplete widget.
  
• Walgreens.com Using YUI AutoComplete: This is not a new implementation, but it’s a noteworthy one — Walgreens.com, the online face of the popular drugstore chain, uses the YUI utility suite and makes excellent use of the YUI AutoComplete widget on its main page to implement its search-suggest feature.
  
• Narayanan A.R., “Putting a YUI Face on a Java Web Application”: According to the author: “Building on my previous article Yahoo’s Rich Web UIs for Java Developers, which discussed how to use various Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Web components for setup and design, this article walks through using YUI to develop a real world application. During the course of the implementation, you will learn how to: Lay out the components, use standard form elements, and handle events.”
• Andrew Burgess’s Crash Course on YUI Grids CSS: Andrew Burgess writes that there are some good reasons to consider YUI Grids CSS to drive your layouts: “YUI grids uses easy-to-remember ids and classes, and clean markup; once you learn it, you could come back to your code in a month and know which parts are from YUI and what each piece does. [Free file hosting on yui.yahooapis.com] reduces your load twice: no need to host the file on your server, as well as faster page loading if the client has the file cached… Yahoo has baked in sidebar widths that correspond with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s ad guidelines.  [And] with multiple templates and the ability to nest page regions, Yahoo claims to offer over 1000 layout combination . . . all in less than 5kb.”  Check out his full tutorial for more.
  
• YUI Sighting — Tweetium, Twitter API Playground from @carolskelly: Carol Skelly set up a nice little explorer for the Twitter API using YUI and jQuery — check it out at http://tweetium.com/. (Original source.)
• Tutorial: Norman Kosmal, “Hide and Show Columns of a YUI DataTable Using Checkboxes”: The title says it all — Norman Kosmal blogs this tutorial about tying the show/hide column API in YUI DataTable to a checkbox UI.
• In-depth into Cookies with YUI Cookie Utility Author: Nicholas C. Zakas, author of the YUI Cookie Utility among other virtuous projects, has a detailed article on browser cookies up on his blog.  Writes Nicholas: “HTTP cookies, most often just called ‘cookies,’ have been around for a while but are still not very well understood. The first problem is a lot of misconceptions, ranging from cookies as spyware or viruses to just plain ignorance over how they work. The second problem is a lack of consistent interfaces to work with cookies. Despite all of the issues surrounding them, cookies are such an important part of web development that, should they disappear without a replacement, many of our favorite web applications would be rendered useless.”  Check out his article for more, including one or two notes about YUI Cookie support.
• Tom Clancy, “YUI Rich Text Editor in Django Admin”: Tom Clancy has posted his notes on using Dav Glass’s YUI Rich Text Editor to enhance Django Admin. (Original source.)
• Caridy Patino Mayea on Using YUI’s Bootstrapping Capabilities: Caridy, author of the popular Bubbling Library extensions for YUI, writes in with a new blog post about bootstrapping: “In this article, I will focus on YUI 2.x and specifically, how you can design your application to use the YUI on-demand capabilities in such a way that the transition to YUI 3.x will be straightforward. The main goal is to describe how we can use YUI to organize the code and learn how to deal with on-demand loading processes…”  Check out his full post for more details.
• Konamicode from Matt Snider: Matt Snider, author of an upcoming YUI Storage Utility (and employee no. 1 at Mint.com), offers up Konamicode: “Recently, many sites (such as espn.com and facebook.com) have added Easter eggs to their JavaScript libraries that are triggered by the old Konami video game code: up up down down left right left right b a enter. While this does not necessarily improve the web architecture, it does make it more fun. To promote more easter eggs like that, I decided to write a simple script that makes integrating the Konami code into your site trivial.” You can read about the Facebook Konami easter egg on TechCrunch.
  
• Dav Glass’s Slides from Open Hack Day in London: Dav gave a talk on YUI 3 for Yahoo’s Open Hack Day in London.  He blogged about the event and posted his slides to Slideshare, for those who weren’t able to be there in person.  YDN has a nice blog post up about the event on YDNBlog as well.
• TYPO3 Extensions Support YUI CSS and RTE: According to its website, “TYPO3 is a free Open Source content management system for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets. It offers full flexibility and extendability while featuring an accomplished set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules.”  Andreas Lappe wrote in to tell us about two TYPO3 extensions, one for YUI CSS and one for YUI Rich Text Editor.  You can see both plugins (and lots of other YUI components) in use on this site.
• Some Thoughts on HTML 5 from JavaScript Library Authors: YUI’s Matt Sweeney and Eric Miraglia are among those whose comments were gathered for a recent InfoQ article by Dionysios Synodinos on HTML 5 and the evolution of JavaScript libraries.
  

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