Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)

In the Wild for March 22, 2010

Some of the most interesting YUI community work to date has been done recently as part of the YUI 3 Gallery Contest 2010; I surveyed some of the entrants on Friday and a few more have come in this weekend, including a Gallery version of Matt Snider’s Radial Menu. The contest is open until the end of the day, and we’re looking forward to reviewing all the entrants over the next few days.

In the meantime, here are some other developments we’ve noted recently. Let us know what me missed in the comments or via @yuilibrary on Twitter.

• AlloyUI Available in Preview — Huge Complement of YUI 3-based Components: Nate Cavanaugh and Eduardo Lundgren of Liferay have been working for the past six months on a new set of UI components (and a few utilities) based on YUI 3.  They’ve debuted the project at AlloyUI.com and Nate introduced the project on his Liferay blog.  We visited with Nate and Eduardo at Yahoo recently and were impressed by the scope and quality of the work — a fantasitc new resource for the YUI community.  We’re looking forward to seeing this content make its way to the YUI 3 Gallery in the near future.
  
• TweetBracket — a Beautiful YUI 2 Carousel Implementation: We love to see creative uses of YUI, and TweetBracket is stellar in this regard.  TweetBracket is a “wisdom of crowds” NCAA tournament application that lets you vote on who you think will win matchups between tournament teams; it ties into Twitter by allowing you to tweet your votes.  The headline here for YUI users is the YUI 2 Carousel implementation that provides the main navigation between games — beautifully skinned, and very intuitive.  TweetBracket is based on YUI 2.8.0. (Original source.)
  
• Carlos Bueno’s YUI 3/jQuery “Rosetta Stone”: Yahoo! alum Carlos Bueno is back with another outstanding technical reference — a cheatsheet for people making the transition from jQuery to YUI 3 (or vice versa).
  
• YUI 2 AutoComplete and More on StarwoodHotels.com: Starwood Hotels has a nice, lightly styled YUI 2 AutoComplete implementation driving their “Enter Destination” field on their main page.  The developers are bringing in the data with YUI 2 Connection Manager and animating the suggestion container with YUI 2 Animation, as in this example that ships with 2.8.0.
  
• YUI 3-based “Twitter Trends” Mini-app by @ericf: Eric Ferriauolo of Oddnut Software, one of the most insightful members of the YUI community, has posted a mini-app using YUI 3 to slice up Twitter trends by time period.  The app is based off the preview YUI’s upcoming 3.1.0 release and uses Slider, Cache, DataType and Luke Smith’s JSONP module from the YUI 3 Gallery.
• Semih Turgut is Working on an Alternative Skin for YUI 2: Based on the default Sam Skin, Semih’s work tones down the color saturation and adopts a more earth/slate color palette.  He says he’s about a month away from having it ready to share — if you like the work, drop by the forum and let him know.
  
• Professor Greg Wilson Covers the YUI 3 Gallery Contest: Professor Greg Wilson of the University of Toronto joins the call to action for the YUI 3 Gallery contest.  Writes Greg: “Contributing to the YUI 3 Gallery is easy if you know some JS and CSS. Several dozen modules already to serve as code-structure models, and there are many reasonably-scoped ideas for new modules that could be completed within a couple of weeks. The prize is fantastic — JSConf has some of the best speakers in the industry, and this year’s lineup is filled with compelling speakers. Win or lose, contributing a visible, enduring piece of code to a well-known OSS project is a fantastic learning experience and an activity that looks great on your resume going forward.” Kay at the University of Washington in Seattle is covering this as well.
  
• YUI 3 and YQL on Choip.me: Joseph Bowman’s Disqus/Twitter mashup Choip.me is using the latest YUI 3.1.0 preview along with YQL in its mission to make Twitter more conversational.
  
• Wayne John on YUI 2′s Reset CSS: Wayne John wrote up his take on YUI’s Reset CSS approach: “What the Yahoo YUI 2 Reset CSS file does is level everything to a known starting point.  When you include the Reset CSS file in your markup, you are essentially saying, “Alright all you browsers of the world, we’re all going to start on the same page, hear me?”.  This helps by allowing the developer to start at a known point, and not from one browser having 5px margins from the start, while another may start with 0px.  By including the Reset CSS, every browser will start with 0px (for example), giving us a great place to start from as developers and designers.”  Check out his post for more.
• YUIG, a GUI for YUI Compressor: Raúl Ferràs has released YUIG, an application for Windows that puts a graphical user interface in front of YUI Compressor.  Other interesting projects in the same vein include RefreshSF’s web-based interface and Dan Wellman’s YUI Compressor Automator Windows application.
• Unicode + YUI 3 “stealth Tweets” Demo from @gaarf: @gaarf posted this gist that he describes as a stealth tweet creator — and an effective one.  Using a unicode transformation function (from Alan Wood), the demo swaps out characters for their circled/double-circled unicode equivalents (or wraps them in parentheses).  The result is a readable tweet, but one that may not show up in string-matching searches. (Original source.)
  

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