Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)

In the Wild for November 18, 2008

Here’s a snapshot of the last few weeks’ worth of YUI Library news from around the web. As always, please let us know in the comments section about what we’ve missed and we’ll make sure to include it in the next update.

• Yahoo Reinvents the Web Portal: There was a lot of coverage of Nicholas C. Zakas’s YUIBlog piece in which he talked about working with us to make YUI 3 the foundation for the new Yahoo Front Page, which is currently in bucket testing.  Stan Schroeder of Mashable writes: “Want to know what the future for big web portals will look like? Yahoo’s developer team might just have an answer. Using…[a] YUI 3-based framework, they’re working on a new front page that will enable extensive customization for users; developers, on the other hand, will be able to create third party applications for the page.”  Dion Almaer of Ajaxian writes: “They are currently testing the new home page out, but having it use the latest and greatest dogfood on a web page as trafficked as the Y! home page is a big deal. Save a few bytes here or there and you are talking serious benefits.”
• WebMonkey Tutorial — Create Rich Interfaces With the YUI Library: WebMonkey produced an outstanding introductory tutorial on YUI last week, definitely worth checking out.  According to the Monkey: “The line between web and desktop applications is fading. Users now expect a richer experience. JavaScript can help provide interfaces and interactions that mimic the desktop. In this tutorial, I’ll introduce you to the JavaScript-based Yahoo User Interface Library. We’ll use it to convert normal HTML into more interactive controls.  Best of all, Yahoo’s library is open-source and has been released under a BSD license, so it’s free for all users.”
  
• Welcome to YUIAsp.Net: Reader raul writes in about a new project that marries YUI and Microsoft .NET: “YUIAsp.Net is the place to get the complete suite of YUIAsp.Net — Yahoo! UI Library(YUI) ASP NET controls for your web applications.  As you [can] see from the documentation and from the live demo, they are extremely fast, flexible and easy to use. Just drag them from the toolbox, customize the behaviour, and you’re set to go.  The next best thing about the YUIAsp.Net is that it’s FREE. You can choose to download just the binaries, you you can also get the sources for the controls, free of charge.” (Original source.)
• How to Prevent Race Conditions when Loading CSS with the YUI Get Utility: Yahoo! Search engineer Ryan Grove writes on his personal blog, wonko.com, about discerning when CSS files loaded with YUI’s Get Utility are fully loaded: “The YUI Get Utility makes it easy to dynamically load CSS and JavaScript on demand, but there’s one tiny gotcha: Firefox, Safari, and other Gecko/WebKit-based browsers don’t provide a reliable way to tell when a CSS file has finished loading. As a result, when you load CSS in one of these browsers using the Get.css() method, the onSuccess callback is fired instantly.  In many cases this isn’t a problem, but if you need to ensure that you don’t perform an action (such as appending HTML to the page) until after the CSS has loaded, this can cause a race condition. There’s no way for the Get Utility to automatically work around this problem, but with a little bit of extra effort on our part, we can work around it ourselves.”  Click through to read Ryan’s full solution.
• Choosing Multiple Color Values Bound to Text Inputs Using a Single Color Picker Instance: Bret Levy has augmented his YUIHelp site with another nice tutorial, this time covering the YUI Color Picker Control.  Writes Bret: “What most people find they want to do is have multiple colorpicker popups on a page, and furthermore, have ‘linked’ user input fields for each input (to show the current RGB color, for example). In doing so, it is important to consider the efficiency of the solution, specifically, it is desirable to have a single colorpicker ‘widget’.”
  
• More “Sheets”-style Simple Dialogs: Eric Ferraiuolo saw Matt Snider’s sheets-style Dialogs in the last “In the Wild” post and wanted to follow up with a version that, he hoped, would be more similar to the OS X model (which wasn’t Matt’s specific goal).  Here’s what Eric came up with — a slick sheets implementation based on the YUI Simple Dialog. (Original source.)
  
• Intelligent YUI Resource Loading with YUI Loader: YUI author Dan Wellman has a new (pay-to-download) article up on DMXZone that treats Adam Moore’s YUI Loader Utlity.  This $3.20 resource follows up on his piece on YUI Get and delves into the power of YUI Loader.  Writes Dan: “YUI Get will indiscriminately get the files you specify but the big difference with YUI loader is that it has been designed to specifically get YUI files. YUI Loader is an intelligent utility that saves you having to include or specify all of the necessary individual files and dependencies for any component; you simply tell it the component(s) you wish to use and it looks at what YUI content exists on the page, and then adds anything else need to make the component work.”
• Paginating Data with CakePHP and Yahoo! User Interface DataTable: CakePHP’s Bakery blog has a fantastic new tutorial on building paginated DataTables using CakePHP and YUI’s DataTable and Paginator controls.
  
• Example YUI Image Upload with YUI 2.6.0: All My Brain has updated its image upload example for YUI Rich Text Editor to support RTE’s 2.6.0 GA release. This example shows you how to add an upload dialog into the RTE’s image properties palette. (Original source.)
• Two New Connection Manager Tutorials from “Share As I Learn”: Blogger Veeru has written two Connection Manager tutorials on his Share as I Learn blog. (Connection Manager, written by YUI founder Thomas Sha, is YUI’s AJAX component.)  The first tutorial is entitled “Using YUI Connection Manager“; the second is “YUI Connection Manager with JSON for Dummies Like Me.”
• BigTweet: BigTweet is a bookmarklet that helps you post to Twitter.
• YUI-based Newsticker: This is an old script, but we missed it when it came out and caught it via Snipplr’s repost — a YUI-based scrolling newsticker widget. (Original source.)
• YUI Sightings — MTBCalendar: MTBCalendar,  “a free service for discovering, organizing and sharing your mountain bike racing season,” has been updated to use YUI CSS Grids. (Original source.)
  

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