Spun

I just adore the Lightbox JS v2.0 photo gallery Javascript library. It’s flashy but usable, it degrades nicely sans Javascript, it looks search engine friendly AND it’s optimized for performance with pre-loading as well. I must hook this up; I’ve already got a couple places in mind.

Social timeline maker Dandelife is really cool but I’m anti-social, and anti-hosted data. Happily, with the open source, fancy pants SIMILE Timeline one can create and host their own timeline. Fabulous.

After reviewing about 17 dozen dynamic RSS reader homepages on Lifehacker (like Google’s Personalized Homepage and Netvibes and Protopage) - which are all basically the same - it warms my heart to see a tutorial on how to build your own.

Hopefully this means these “desktop” homepages have jumped the shark and everyone move their “WebOS” dev efforts onto something a bit more innovative (and useful!).

The Yahoo! User Interface Library’s got a bunch of open source Ajaxy UI components, including a Calendar control, Drag and Drop, a Slider and Tree View. Neat.

Here’s a really neat DHTML expand and collapse tree view for list items. Simply include a javascript and CSS file into your page, then apply the appropriate ID’s to your list. Check out my quick and dirty demo.

Thanks, Su!

Here’s some useful edit-in-place Flickr style DHTML.

I’m building this thing with some buddies. My current responsibility is the prototype. This thing’s going to use some DHTML and AJAX, and I can envision the screens in my mind, all working in beautiful, usable form, a culmination of all the good interface techniques I’ve seen without all the ones that suck.

So I start to prototype, and I decide I want to totally wow my friends with a nearly-working front end. I’ve only got a few days, mind you - we’re working in 3-day dev cycles. And like an idiot, I wind up getting totally bogged down in writing and debugging Javascript for one little minor piece of functionality that we’ll probably throw out in the end anyway because this is a quick and dirty prototype. End result? Instead of a flashy, nearly-working proto, I had NOTHING to show for all my Javascript screwing around.

Lesson? There is no room for anal perfectionism in rapid prototyping.

Forget XMLHttpRequest, this Ajax method sets the src of an img dynamically to pull data from the server.

ObjectGraph’s define-as-you-type dictionary and Wikiwax’s dynamic Wikipedia lookup are my two favorite uses of Ajax.

Tim Taylor’s drag and drop sortable lists with Javascript and CSS could be a useful dynamic control on a web page. I use it in the not-yet released Scribblish for authors to reorder custom fields on the article edit page. It would also work well to reorder photos in a gallery app. Here’s a few examples of the drag and drop lists in action.