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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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.

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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