I’m pleased to report that it seems the release candidate was a success, so I’m announcing the final release of Shadowbox version 2.0. I’ve put a lot of work into it, and I hope you enjoy it.

Some changes from version 1.0 include (but are not limited to) the following:

• More stable communication between adapters for all frameworks
• Smoother and more consistent animation
• Improved support for Internet Explorer 7
• More modular code design and custom build form
• Improved i18n support
• Much improved skinning API

Really, the list could get quite long here. The truth is that it’s late, I’m tired, and unfortunately, I don’t really keep a nice, neat change log of every change that I make to the code. So I apologize to those of you who find them useful. Perhaps I’ll take that up in the future. In reality, I made hundreds of little tweaks and performance enhancements, so the list would be very long a boring anyways. Just trust me when I say that version 2 is much better than 1 ever was.

Many thanks to Wizzud (in the forums) whose help has been invaluable in squashing numerous bugs and who has generously donated hours of time to help stem the onslaught of support requests.

As always, please post any questions you may have in the forum instead of here on my blog. Enjoy!

Don’t worry. I’m not dead…yet. It has been a crazy couple of months since I released the first version of Shadowbox. If you’re wondering what I’ve been up to, here’s a short list:

• Graduated college
• Took a week-long vacation to Hawai’i
• Ate way too many Mauna Loa’s
• Moved
• Started a new job

I’m pretty sure that at least 3 of the above qualify as major life-altering events, so please excuse me for not having released a major update to Shadowbox in the past few months. ;) I’m back now.

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Hello all! It has been quite a while since I’ve posted anything here. I’ve been spending most of my free time improving Shadowbox instead of writing new blog material.

Due to popular demand, the next version of Shadowbox will have much improved i18n support (among other improvements). However, unfortunately I’m only fluent in 1.5 languages (English and some Italian), so I need your help. If you would like Shadowbox translated into your native tongue, please translate the following object and post it here or send it to me.

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Just like almost every other blogger I know, I recently fell victim to the blog redesign bug. I apologize to those of you who have been waiting for new features to be incorporated into Shadowbox, but I just felt like I had to get this off of my mind first. Now that it’s done (with a few small bugs still hanging around in various browsers no doubt) I’ll be getting on with more serious projects.

One major change that I made with the site is in the commenting. Instead of using straight HTML, I switched to using John Gruber’s Markdown format. In fact, pretty much the whole site is based on Markdown now. The posts, comments, and even the comment preview function. By the way, I plan on making the comment preview plugin available on WordPress as soon as I get some time.

If you’re afraid of Markdown, don’t be. It is the most easy-to-use writing tool that I can think of. In fact, I bet you already know most of the rules.

I have a lot of good stuff in the works that I’ll be making publicly available very soon. In the meantime, feel free to let me know what you think of the redesign!

This morning, I released version 1.0 of Shadowbox. In its first month, the beta was downloaded over 15,000 times! I really appreciate the amount of interest the JavaScript community has shown in this project. I’m working hard to make sure that it’s a quality piece of code, and I hope you enjoy it. The 1.0 version includes the following feature enhancements over the previous betas:

• Extensive and fully documented JavaScript API
• Compatibility with the original Lightbox HTML markup
• Support for image maps
• Numerous other options and bug fixes

If you have any questions about how to use Shadowbox for your project, please ask them in the support forum.

More information here.

It’s been difficult to keep the discussion threads organized here on my blog, so I opened up a forum with the nice folks at Nabble. Please post any questions or difficulties that you’re having with Shadowbox in that venue.

You can find it here.

Wow. One evening, about three weeks ago, I stayed up late working on a little JavaScript app called Shadowbox that I had been working on for several weeks. Before I went to bed, I shot off an email to the jQuery mailing list and made a quick post in the Ext.js forums just to see if anybody else would be interested in using it.

Little did I know.

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Here is a set of additive color model conversion algorithms that I found published on Wikipedia and have implemented in JavaScript. It was surprisingly difficult to find these actually implemented anywhere in compact, efficient, and bug-free code, so I wrote my own. These should be easily portable to other programming languages if desired.

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A few months ago, I was looking for a way to install PHP 5.3 alongside 5.2 on my development machine, a MacBook. Why? It has a lot to do with the new late static bindings and namespaces that have already been committed into PHP’s HEAD. I’ve been anticipating these features for a while now, and I was anxious to try them out.

Special thanks goes to MacPorts’ Ryan Schmidt who helped me out on this thread.

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A few weeks ago, I was looking for a Lightbox-like script that would allow me to display more than just pictures. In addition to static images, my client required the ability to display various types of movies including QuickTime and SWF. The only script that fit the bill was Lightwindow—a nice piece of work to be sure—but it required the Prototype + Scriptaculous combo and I was already using YUI.

Besides, I thought, it would be really great to have a full-featured media viewing application that was library agnostic. Then, if I need to use a different framework for some particular reason, I can easily switch.

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