In the Wild for February 16, 2010

February 16, 2010 at 10:10 am by Eric Miraglia | In In the Wild | Comments Off

Some recent news and notes from the YUI community follows. What did we miss? Let us know in the comments or @yuilibrary on Twitter.

Matt Snider’s YUI 3-based Radial Menus: Matt Snider’s most recent project was inspired by Bioware’s designers: “Today’s article is inspired by the Radial Menu found in many of Bioware’s RPGs, such as Dragon Age. At the press of a button, the menu appears on the screen (usually pausing the game), and allows players to choose common commands. The same type of menu is possible on the web, and may even be more useful than the traditional navigation. We will use JavaScript, CSS, and YUI3 to build flexible Radial Menu widget that appears in the center of the page and responds to end-user clicks.” Check out the article and the example for full details.
Twitsteps — Twitter- and YUI-powered Microforums for Any Site: Twitsteps is an easy-to-install and extremely attractive widget based on YUI 2 that adds Twitter-driven discussions to any site. Very slick implementation. (Original source.)
EtreProprio — a YUI-based Real Estate Website for Individuals in France: Philippe Bernou, CEO of EtreProprio.com, wrote in to tell us about his site, which provides attractive classified property listings for individuals selling their own properties. EtreProprio caters to the French market. The site makes terrific use of YUI 2, including a wide range of utilities and widgets.
Chris Heilmann’s First YUI 3 Hack, “Flickr Collector”: The Yahoo! Developer Network’s Christian Heilmann, author of numerous YUI-based hacks over the years, has is first YUI 3 app up: “Flickr Collector is a simple interface to collect photos from Flickr and copy and paste the HTML to embed them into web sites. Click any of the photos below to see its details. Below the photo you will get the HTML code to copy and paste.You can drag photos into the collection below the thumbnails and remove them from the bin by dragging them into the removal box. Once you are done, hit the ‘See all code’ button to get the HTML of all the photos in your collection box.”
Rich Text Editor Review on Six Revisions: Jeff Starr of Perishable Press reviews Rich Text Editor widgets for Jacob Gube’s Six Revisions blog. Here’s what he has to say about Dav Glass’s YUI Rich Text Editor: “The YUI Editor is included as part of the extensive Yahoo User-Interface Library (YUI). YUI Editor features valid XHTML, a growing number of plugins, decent documentation, great support for mobile devices, and even drag-n-drop inclusion and sizing of images. Plus, the YUI Editor’s toolbar is easily extensible for advanced and highly customized implementations.”
KQED Making Broad Use of YUI 2.8.0 Utilities and Widgets: We noted not too long ago that KQED public radio was using some YUI, but the usage is now broad and extensive. The main KQED page is now using the utilities rollup plus Cookie, TabView, and Container. All things consdered, we’re thrilled to see YUI on the site!
Video: Philip Tellis’s Overview of YUI Flot Charting from FOSDEM: YUI contributor (and Yahoo! performance engineer) Philip Tellis ported the popular Flot charting library to YUI 2, and he spoke about the work at FOSDEM in Brussels earlier this month. The FOSDEM team has the 44 minute talk up on YouTube.
Eric Ferraiuolo on “Auto-Building YUI 3 Custom Modules”: Eric Ferraiuolo has a new post up on his 925html blog: “YUI 3’s modularity and instance sandboxing invite developers to create their own custom modules, breaking apart their specific application logic. Having developed over 30 Custom YUI 3 Modules in the last year I quickly realized I needed a sane way to go from writing code to running it in the browser. So, I set out to connect the YUI Builder with my IDE.” Read on for more details about Eric’s approach. And, in case you missed it, check out Eric’s presentation on custom modules from YUICONF 2009.
Sitepoint Calls YUI Grids Builder a “big Time-saving Tool”: Writes Meitar Moscovitz: “The YUI Grid Builder is an elegant, visual way to create robust CSS-based layouts from scratch. All you need to do is punch in your desired layout, specifying the page’s width (fixed or fluid), the number of columns you want, and how wide each of them should be. You can even split a section into two or more subsections, creating nested column layouts with ease.” The Grid Builder is a visual tool that works with YUI 2′s CSS Grids.
Cory O’Daniel Releases Simpler Ruby Wrapper for YUI Compressor: Cory O’Daniel continues to work on his Ruby wrapper for YUI Compressor, releasing a simpler, ~50 line version: “On a new project I’m working on *I just need a inline YUI compressor* and I dont give a [darn] about anything else like bundling, globbing or whatever. So I ended up throwing together this little (~50 lines less comments) Ruby YUI Compressor to do my dirty work.” Check out the implementation here.