Shadowbox 2.0 RC1

30 Jun 2008 | tags: JavaScript, Projects, Shadowbox | 31 Comments »

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.

I’ve also been prowling the web to find out how people are using Shadowbox and where it comes short. The biggest problems that I’ve been hearing (and that I’ve tried to address with this release) are the following:

  • Support for i18n
  • More consistent animation support across libraries (particularly MooTools)
  • Better theme/skin support
  • Better documentation
  • Support for slideshows (on an automatic timer)
  • Standalone version without need for an external JavaScript library
  • More modular code (file size)

I’m proud to announce that I believe I’ve solved every one of the above issues with this release, as well as squashed a number of minor bugs.

This is just a release candidate, in case I’ve missed something obvious. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

Shadowbox project page

31 Comments

  • theturninggate
    30 Jun 2008 at 10:13 pm

    Wonderful that you’re back with a new release, and I hope you enjoyed your time away. I can tell you that Shadowbox has been getting a hell of a lot of use by professional photographers for their web photo galleries, using my Shadowbox template for Adobe Lightroom. Everyone loves it. The only problem anyone seems to have is the limited space for title/caption. It would be fantastic to get captions on the bottom in such a way that they resize to accommodate caption length.

    Haven’t checked yet whether the new skinning options remedy this, but will dig into the new release hopefully this week.

    Thanks!

    Matt

  • mjijackson
    1 Jul 2008 at 6:12 am

    @Matt: There’s just one problem with the captioning that I can’t figure out, otherwise I would’ve added it by now. The problem is that it’s impossible to know how much space the caption will take up once the box is fully sized because as the box gets bigger/smaller, the number of lines required for the caption change. Because Shadowbox aligns itself so closely with the dimensions of the viewport, I need to know the eventual height of the caption box before starting the resize.

    Other lightboxes don’t have really good support for detecting the size of the viewport (and resizing when the viewport is resized), and some don’t use fixed positioning, so it’s not really an issue for them. However, I wanted to make the calculations as exact as possible, and that’s why I’m stumped.

  • RaBic
    1 Jul 2008 at 6:54 am

    Great Work, Thank you. I’ve bought a license on June 09, 2008 because I would like to use Shadowbox in some sites that I develop for customers… and to honor your work :) The only thing I received till now, was a payment confirmation from Paypal. Am I allowed to use Shadowbox now or will you send some sort of invoice / license in the future?

  • InLikeALion
    1 Jul 2008 at 3:27 pm

    Any snags hit yet? I’m looking to through this onto some production sites which currently use the original Lightbox 2. I really appreciate how easy you made it to switch between the 2 using the same syntax.

    Thanks for your work.

  • j.verhine
    1 Jul 2008 at 5:23 pm

    The only gripe I have about it is that you can’t open up http://www.url.com/folder/folder within shadowbox because it doesn’t recognize the extension.. should have it default to iframe rather than not initialize the shadowbox at all

  • j.verhine
    1 Jul 2008 at 5:24 pm

    I’m really impressed though. You put a lot of work into this.

  • mjijackson
    1 Jul 2008 at 8:58 pm

    @InLikeALion: Nope. After 24 hours and over 700 downloads, everything has been pretty quiet so far. I’ll probably give people a week or so to poke around before putting out an official 2.0, but the syntax and functionality won’t change much between now and then so you should be safe.

    @j.verhine: I understand your gripe. However, you could just use the player attribute in your link’s rel attribute to make the player an iframe.

  • theturninggate
    1 Jul 2008 at 10:16 pm

    Re: Captions

    Would it be possible to use mouse-over captioning and have them overlay the image/content, similar to what SmoothGallery does (ex: http://theturninggate.net/galleries/TTGLRPages/TTGXMLAutoIndex/TTGSmoothGallery/)?

  • mjijackson
    1 Jul 2008 at 11:24 pm

    @theturninggate: I don’t think that would work very well on content other than images. I’m pretty sure that Flash and video content would fail completely, and it would also be very difficult (if not impossible) to implement on an iframe. :/

  • Max
    2 Jul 2008 at 1:09 am

    I like the slideshow options, this is very nice, but where is the fading effect when shadobox is opening?

  • mjijackson
    2 Jul 2008 at 7:45 am

    @Max: I cut it out because it made for a slower opening. It still fades when it closes. You’re very observant. I didn’t think anyone would miss it. Besides, browsers on computers without a lot of memory have a very hard time with that part.

  • Jonathan Christopher
    2 Jul 2008 at 8:53 am

    Loving this project, upset I hadn’t found it before yesterday. Purchased a license just a few minutes ago, keep up the great work!

  • ed
    3 Jul 2008 at 6:59 am

    Hello All.

    Forgive me for no doubt such a stupid question but i am a complete beginner.

    I have an HTML with an embedded SWF and want to launch shadowbox showing playing a flv - but the link to launch it is in the SWF and therefore i need to some kind of actionscript to call the js?

    Can anyone point me in the right direction here?

    Thanks

  • Tim Beadle
    3 Jul 2008 at 7:03 am

    Hi,

    This library is amazing; we’re using it for displaying flv videos and will be purchasing a licence.

    One question though - the flash videos aren’t showing in Firefox 3, either the ones we’re producing or the demos on the Shadowbox site. Any ideas?

    Thanks,

    Tim

  • mjijackson
    3 Jul 2008 at 7:30 am

    @ed: Try the forum.

    @Tim: Strange…perhaps you could try disabling your add-ons. Sometimes you’ll come across one that will mess with Flash pieces.

  • Tim Beadle
    3 Jul 2008 at 9:14 am

    @michael: yep, that was it. I ran Firefox 3 under a clean profile with no addons and it worked fine. No idea which addon caused it, though.

    Thanks again for a great library,

    Tim

  • David
    3 Jul 2008 at 12:08 pm

    I finally got around to testing the new version. I LOVE it! The customization and options are fantastic. I too, however, miss the fade when opening. Could that possibly be an option as well? Also, it’d be nice if we could control the fade duration as well as the resize duration.

    Thanks for your excellent work!

  • mjijackson
    3 Jul 2008 at 10:00 pm

    @David: The resize duration is already an option.

  • lndrs
    6 Jul 2008 at 1:24 am

    I think SB is great, really nice.

    I wondered: Isn’t it possible to have the caption of the image as a seperate , in this way the caption doesn’t show when mousing over the link. That would be nice!

    Great work mjijackson!

  • lndrs
    6 Jul 2008 at 1:25 am

    Edit: [...] of the image as a seperate DIV [...]

  • Rawkes Weekly – 6 July 2008 » Captain's Blog » Rawkes
    6 Jul 2008 at 8:02 am

    [...] media viewer Shadowbox was updated to version 2.0 RC 1. I’ve used this in the past a few times and I would recommend it to anyone looking for decent [...]

  • David
    7 Jul 2008 at 10:47 am

    @mjijackson Oh, yes, or course… I mean “in addition to”… bleh. What I mean to ask is if we can control the fade duration the same way we can the resize duration. lol

  • David
    7 Jul 2008 at 2:52 pm

    Is it just me or has IE7 taken a big performance hit? I’m getting really choppy animations and sluggish performance.

  • mjijackson
    7 Jul 2008 at 3:15 pm

    @David: The problems with IE7 are being discussed in the forums and will be fixed in the final release.

  • David
    7 Jul 2008 at 4:03 pm

    Great! I should have known better and headed there first. Damn this allergy medicine….

  • Tigger
    8 Jul 2008 at 5:04 am

    Great work!

    But I found some problems when using version 2.0 RC1. With least version of jQuery and the jquery adapter, the shabowbox open very very slow in IE7 and IE8 while other browsers are okay (included IE6).

  • mrbabyqc
    8 Jul 2008 at 8:11 am

    Hi mjijackson, Very exciting job ! I use the first version of shadobox on my blog. Since the version 2.0rc1 give us the ability to implement shadobox in standalone mode, can you tell us what can be the benefit to use it in conjunction with any open source JavaScript framework (like prototype, mootools, etc) ? In term of load time, functionality ?

    TIA

  • mjijackson
    8 Jul 2008 at 4:16 pm

    @Tigger: Please read the other comments before writing something. Your issue is directly addressed exactly two comments above yours.

    @mrbabyqc: The only advantage to using Shadowbox in stand-alone mode is that you won’t have as many files to load. The disadvantage is that you won’t have all of the functionality of the underlying framework (should you need it).

  • Bon
    8 Jul 2008 at 4:23 pm

    Hi, how can I have a page without an extension work with shadowbox through rel? something like website.com/login/ Thanks for your help.

  • spulp
    9 Jul 2008 at 11:20 pm

    I created a [gallery], but the images display (upon load) starting with the last one first. How can I fix this. I’m obviously a beginner - help. Thanks.

  • Trent Tompkins
    23 Jul 2008 at 11:46 pm

    I have spent the last two days modding this, and all I can say is WOW. I didn’t want something buggy or bloated, and after two days I have an awesome, single file, 22kb lightbox that is 100% what I wanted. I’m not using a framework, so I added DomEvent to fire it off, and added some custom functions to keep it from failing if it’s clicked before the init. The code was great to work with, WELL worth the $20! It works GREAT in everything!

    It breaks if I compress it with script diet, so I compressed it with YUI, which is better anyway because now I can use straight PHP code to change the options.