YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release 1: Touch Event Support, Gestures, Transitions, CSS Grids, ScrollView, Uploader, and More

July 26, 2010 at 12:24 pm by Eric Miraglia | In Development | 15 Comments

The YUI contributor’s team is pleased to announce the first developer preview of the upcoming YUI 3.2.0 release. This preview provides an opportunity for developers and implementers to help test the release for potential regressions and to provide feedback on new features and components. If you have an existing YUI implementation, please exercise YUI 3.2.0pr1 in your development environment and let us know what you find.

There are three ways to get started with the preview release:

Use from the CDN: YUI 3.2.0pr1 is available on the CDN via the 3.2.0pr1 version tag — so you can reference preview-release files like http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?3.2.0pr1/build/yui/yui-min.js. If you switch to this seed file for the preview release, all subsequent use() statements will continue to load YUI 3.2.0pr1.
Download the release: Download YUI 3.2.0pr1 from YUILibrary.com, including source code and examples for all components — including those new to this release.
Explore the examples: As a convenience, we’ve posted the preview (along with the functioning examples roster) to YUIBlog. Feel free to explore the release there as a prelude to switching your CDN version reference (or downloading the preview) and testing it out in your own environment.

Noteworthy Changes Coming in YUI 3.2.0

As with all YUI development work, you can track our current plans and progress on our YUI 3 tasklist, including a comprehensive list of YUI 3.2.0 (and some upcoming 3.3.0) changes; you can also check in on our progress addressing issues in the bug database. Here are some of the new and updated components featured in the 3.2.0 developer preview:

Intrinsic support for touch events has been added (mynode.on("touchstart", function(e) {});). We’ve also added a Gestures module with two bundled gestures — gesture-flick and gesture-move — that work with both touch- and mouse-driven devices. Check out the API docs or the bundled sample page for ideas about how to start using Gestures.
YUI’s intrinsic Loader now supports capability-based loading. This allows us to segregate, for example, IE-specific code into separate submodules and allow the Loader to bundle that code only for browsers that require it. We’re leveraging this new feature to avoid shipping IE-specific code in the Dom module to non-IE browsers, a performance/k-weight boost that will benefit all users of modern browsers with no code change required.
YUI 3’s animation portfolio now supports transitions via the Transition module, providing browser normalization for this powerful, hardware-accelerated (where available) technique for handling transitions; check out the example for sample code. Animation, in its most basic form, has a streamlined dependency tree for modern browsers, significantly reducing the k-weight for simple animation in better browsers.
YUI 3.2.0 will bring with it a new beta version of YUI’s CSS Grids component, and you can begin exploring this new approach to Grids in the preview release. The examples are the best place to start.
We worked with Michael Johnston of the Yahoo! Mobile Engineering team to bring a new (beta) ScrollView widget to YUI 3.2.0. ScrollView provides a scrolling pane implementation familiar to users of native Apple iOS applications, emulating the elasticity of the element when scrolled to the beginning or ending limit. You’ll see in the 3.2.0pr1 examples for ScrollView that this component is device neutral, working well with a mouse as well as with touch events on your Android or iOS device.
The Uploader component from YUI 2 is now part of the YUI 3 family as well, debuting as a beta in 3.2.0.
The History module that debuted with YUI 3.0.0, which was a port of the YUI 2 version, has been deprecated (it remains available in YUI 3.2.0 as history-deprecated). A new beta History utility debuts in 3.2.0, based on Ryan Grove’s History Lite module from the YUI 3 Gallery. A preview-release example from the new component is a good starting reference.
The JSONP and YQL Query modules from the YUI 3 Gallery have become canonical components, debuting as beta in this release.

Feedback

The goal of a preview release is to make it as easy as possible for all of us in the community to evaluate progress of the upcoming release and provide feedback. Please take some time to test 3.2.0pr1 and let us know what you find by filing tickets in the YUI 3 bug database marked as “Observed in version” 3.2.0pr1. We’ll do our best to address preview-release questions on the YUI 3 Forums, too.

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