Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)

In the Wild for April 23, 2009

News and notes from the YUI community from the past few weeks…as always, we ask you to let us know in the comments about projects and articles that we missed.

• Dan Wellman, “A Look at the New YUI Carousel Control”: Dan Wellman, who literally wrote the book on YUI, has a new article out on DevShed treating Gopal Venkatesan’s YUI Carousel Control (inspired by the work of Bill Scott).  Writes Dan:  “The Yahoo! User Interface library continues to grow and expand with new components being added and existing components being continually patched and updated to ensure full x-browser support and cutting-edge functionality. Version 3 of the YUI is due for full release at some point this year, but version 2 (current release 2.6) is at this point still the stable and recommended release for general use.  One of the components recently added is the Carousel component, a control for automatically scrolling content in an attractive and intuitive interface. It’s still a beta release at present ,which indicates that the API is not finalized and that there are likely to be bugs that need addressing. We can still use the component, though, and although we should be wary as the existing API may change, the full release will probably bring more new functionality than changes in how it is implemented. In this tutorial we’ll be looking at a basic implementation of the control, the functionality we can use at this point in time, and the properties and methods exposed by the current API.” Check out the full article/tutorial on Carousel here.
• Jeethu Rao, “A Mochikit-style Dombuilder for YUI”: Writes Jeethu: “Before moving to YUI about a year ago, I was using Mochikit as my primary JS library. As advertised, Mochikit happens to be one of the most pythonic javascript libraries ever. One of the sweetest parts of Mochikit IMO has been Mochikit.DOM. This is something which I’ve always missed with YUI. innerHTML is fast, but icky and it feels a little inelegant. So, I ended up writing something like Mochikit.DOM for YUI while writing Tagz. Thought it might be useful to others as well. So, here’s the mercurial repo with the code.” Check out the full blog post here. (Original source.)
• Niceforms — Form Styling Enhancements Based on YUI: The folks at FreshCut have released v0.1 of Niceforms for YUI. According to the release, Niceforms is ”an easy to use and highly configurable YUI plugin to give most form controls a modern look that is consistent across all major browsers.”  Niceforms is licensed under a Creative Commons license and full documentation and a live demo are available.
  
• SlowGeek.com — YUI-based Nike Plus Mashup from Rasmus Lerdorf: PHP inventor Rasmus Lerdorf has a site called SlowGeek.com that taps into Nike Plus data to present a graphical and interactive look at your running history.  Check out Rasmus’s own stats to get a sense of the interface — and you’ll quickly learn that, far from being a “slow geek,” Rasmus is actually a speedy and dedicated mid-distance runner.  YUI components including DataTable, TabView and more are on display.  If you have a Nike Plus account, you can start using app yourself — just go to http://slowgeek.com/pr/[your username] for directions on how to get started.
  
• YUI Carousel on Public.resource.org Films Site: public.resource.org has a nice implementation of Gopal Venkatesan’s YUI Carousel on its National Technical Information Service Library of Commerce films site. Developer Greg Palmer wants to see a lot more YUI usage in government web development, as he argues in “Leveraging Yahoo’s UI Library to Speed Development” on his blog. (Original source.)
  
• Jobseeker Site Resumebucket Using YUI: Reader “P” wrote in to tell us about resumebucket, a slick resumes site for job seekers.  Resumebucket uses a broad swath of YUI components, including the Core + Loader platform, Connection Manager, and JSON. (Original source.)
  
• New YUI 3.x Support from the Grails YUI Project: mingfai has added support for the latest YUI 3 preview release in his Grails YUI plugin; support is also provided for YUI 2.x.
• YUI Sighting — Twitter for Busy People: Glenn wrote in to tell us about Twitter for Busy People.  The product aims to “give users a more dynamic and intuitive way to catch up on their friends’ twitter updates.  We use the Dom utility a lot for positioning the updates window and for mouse positioning; the Event utility for all mouse interaction; and the Pagination utility was great for users with many friends!  We also used the ‘Dependency Configurator‘ and the YUI Compressor to minimize this site’s footprint to an amazing 43k total payload!” (Original source.)
  
• YUI Sighting — GameFly: Dylan Oudyk wrote in to tell us about “the redesign of GameFly.  We’re making extensive use of menus, tabview, overlay, grids, reset, and calendar.  Also have drag/drop for our GameQ implementation; when I worked on the old site a couple years ago I used YUI version 0.10.3 with some browser workarounds, so it feels good to be all up to 2.7.0 now because I don’t have to do that anymore.” (Original source.)
  
• YUI TabView and More in Use at Mathsbank: Luke Robinson wrote in to tell us about YUI use at mathsbank, a UK math site for teachers and students.  TabView is the most prominent component used, driving navigation for many of the site’s categories. (Original source.)
  
• C.S. Lai, “Maintaining State with YUI Event”: C.S. Lai has written up some ruminations on Adam Moore’s YUI Event Utility.  Check out the blog post here.

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