Last week I pushed out some major updates to my most well-known piece of work to date, Shadowbox. This update finally brought version 3 of the code out of beta and into a much more robust and ready state. Overall I’m very happy with the release. It took much longer than I expected (for a lot of different reasons), but the time it took just helped to produce a better product in the end.
Andy Clarke:
As you might expect when you combine Jeffrey Veen and Jason Santa Maria, Typekit’s interface emphasizes function with understated style. It doesn’t try too hard to impress, instead it’s quietly confident and self-assured.
Charles Ying introduces “A new 3D CSS Visual Effects demo using pure HTML, WebKit’s 3D CSS Effects extensions and JavaScript.”
The next minor version of jQuery is ready for testing.
Excellent article by Objective-J author Francisco Tolmasky in response to John Resig’s original article on JavaScript language abstractions. Although I’m a huge fan of Resig’s work and generally believe him to be right on with his evaluation of things, I tend to side with Tolmasky on this one.
John Resig:
The vast majority of web developers have never filed a bug report with a browser vendor — or even used a nightly version of a browser — which is a shame. If you think about it there are few who are more qualified to assess what is going wrong in a browser than those who spend every day developing for them.
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 2 languages (English and Italian), so I need your help. If you would like Shadowbox translated into your native tongue, please translate the following object and send it to me.
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:
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.
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.