Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)

In the Wild for April 9, 2010

There’s been a lot of activity in the world of YUI lately, including our first community Open Hour this morning that was attended by 30 developers from around the world. And as soon as you’re done kicking the tires of YUI 3 running on the server with full DOM/BOM support, here are a few other things worth a minute of your time:

• YUI 3′s “quiet Revolution”, from @triptych: Writes Andrew Wooldridge, in reference to the YUI 3 Gallery: “With other libraries, you have to find and link to extensions yourself manage updates, and never know if the developer of the plugin you are depending on will stick with their code. With YUI 3 you know the code is open source, you can fork it if you need to, and since it’s hosted by Yahoo you know that it’ll probably stick around for some time. Not only that, but you know have a built-in almost App Store system for creating extensions! Say you have some interesting JavaScript effect, or some novel way to do something via js. You simply make it a YUI component and everyone who uses YUI 3 can include your code with essentially a single word (like “gallery-somefreakingawesomecode”). They don’t have to know who you are, you dont have to worry about hosting your code, and you get not only and instant audience, but with GitHub you get people who can help you make your code better.”
• Series of YUI 2 Video Tutorials on YouTube: This video series, which was made during the YUI 2.5.x timeframe, has recently come to YouTube and still contains some excellent introductory material on YUI 2.

  There appear to be about seven videos in the series: getting and exploring YUI, Ajax tutorial part 1, Ajax tutorial part 2, Ajax tutorial part 3, Ajax tutorial part 4, [not available] Ajax tutorial part 5, Ajax tutorial part 6.

• YUI 3 on MSN Glo: Rodrigo Castilho told us about MSN’s use of YUI 3 on the Glo website.  Animation, IO, JSON and a series of custom modules are at work on the site. (Original source.)
  
• MSN Wonderwall Using YUI 2: Celebrity news, photos and gossip site MSN Wonderwall makes heavy use of YUI 2 and is loading YUI 3 — perhaps in preparatin for a transition.  Great to see good use of YUI at MSN.
  
• MarkoutJS — a Templating API Based on YUI 3 from @ericf: Eric Ferriauolo of OddNut Software in Boston has released MarkoutJS, a templating API for creating DOM elements.  MarkoutJS is built on YUI 3 and is part of the YUI 3 Gallery, so as of the 3.1.0 release you can use it directly from the use() statement by requesting the gallery-markout module.
  
• YUI 3 Event Delegation Tutorial from @kickballcreativ: Lauren Smith of Kickball Creative, author of the excellent YUISand module in the YUI 3 Gallery, has posted a tutorial on using YUI 3′s intrinsic support for event delegation — a powerful performance-enhancing strategy.
  
• Andrew Bialecki Updates the Effects Module in YUI 3 Gallery: Andrew Bialecki, after winning the YUI 3 Gallery contest with his Effects module, isn’t resting on his laurels. The first significant update to the component has already been posted. Full docs for the project are up on Andrew’s site.
  
• Matt Snider Writes About His Radial Menu Module in the YUI 3 Gallery: Writes Matt: “The RadialMenu gallery component is finished and available on GitHub at http://github.com/mattsnider/yui3-gallery/downloads. The latest version of the RadialMenu improves on the previous two articles by having the RadialMenu and RadailMenuPanel objects extend Overlay. By using the overlay component, RadialMenu can leverage the knowledge and experience that went into developing overlay, and we remove the need to mask the page with an invisible div.”
• YUI 3-based Carousel Implementation on IPRD.org.uk: The world of YUI 3 widgets has another entrant in the form of a new carousel component developed for IPRD website in the UK. The developer has begun the process of submitting the widget to the YUI 3 Gallery.
  
• JYUI from @kickballcreativ — Add YUI 2 and 3 Modules to Any JQuery Project: Lauren Smith of Kickball Creative, author of the YUISand plugin in the YUI 3 Gallery, has created a follow-on project to YQuery (which allows you to load and use jQuery from within YUI 3).  The new project is jYUI, which, as you might suspect, does the reverse — makes YUI 3′s broad assortment of modules available to you easily within any jQuery-based project.  As usual, Lauren has numerous examples up on his site.
• Using Configuration Groups in the YUI Loader, Via @kickballcreativ: Lauren Smith of Kickball Creative has posted a tutorial on using configuration groups in Adam Moore’s YUI Loader.  Writes Lauren: “First thing to get out of the way is that this is not a sexy topic of discussion. Nothing is going flying across the screen doing all sorts of killer fx. However, if loading your site as efficiently as possible gets you excited then read on. The YUI loader is extremely powerful and the config settings that are provided to us are extensive and allow us a lot of flexibility over how we handle the processing of our pages.”  Check out the tutorial for full details.
• “Photos Around You”, a YUI 3.1.0 Mashup by Eric Ferraiuolo: Eric Ferraiuolo is a stalwart member of the YUI community (he spoke at YUICONF 2009), and pairing him with one of the web’s most visually interesting API’s, Flickr, was bound to result in good things.  His “Photos Around You” mashup brings together some of the best characteristics of YUI 3.1.0 along with the visual richness of Flickr and the emerging web/geo connection to make for a fun and entertaining exploration. (Eric wrote more about the project on his blog, and Rey Bango covered this project on Ajaxian.)
  
• Anthony Pipkin’s Growl-style Notifications for YUI 3: Developer Anthony Pipkin is working on growl-style notifications for YUI 3; he’s got a demo up, along with an alternative skin. (Original source.)
  
• YUI in Use on Seattle Sunglass Co. Website: A YUI user wrote in to tell us that Seattle Sunglass Co.’s website is among the many ecommerce sites powered by YUI 2 — in this case, 2.8.0.
• Congrats to Our YUI-using Friends at Alfresco on a Great Year: Congratulations to the team at Alfresco, heavy users of YUI 2, where they continue to demonstrate that the virtuous cycle of building open source solutions on open source foundations can lead both to happy customers and to solid revenues.
  
• Todd Kloots’s YUI 2 Menu on BowlingBall.com: If you’d asked me five years ago whether DHTML menus were intersting, I would have said — “Um, not so much.” But after watching Todd Kloots, now at Twitter, spend a couple of years perfecting the YUI 2 Menu Control, it always makes me happy to see his elegant menu system powering the navigation of sites across the web.  Bowlingball.com is a site that makes good use of Todd’s work to drive its primary menu-nav system across the top of the page.
  

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