Archive for the ‘AJAX’ Category
Friday, April 4th, 2008
CSS Type Set is an online application created to assist beginner CSS developers with the task of font styling. It features an AJAX-powered interface that automagically updates the preview pane in real time. The resulting CSS syntax can then be copied and pasted into a CSS file. Give it a try!
Posted in Font, Typography, AJAX, Tools, CSS | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

GlassBox is a JavaScript library that allows you to add Windows Vista-like transparent effects on your website. It runs on top of the the Prototype and Script.aculo.us library and comes complete with an API documentation and tons of examples. It is released under the MIT license.
Posted in JavaScript, Interface, Effects, Animation, Tools, AJAX, CSS | No Comments »
Monday, March 24th, 2008
I’ve seen at least three submissions over here at CSS Vault of sites that use the “Step Carousel” effect. I did not even know what it was called until I saw this article, which outlines the steps needed to accomplish the effect using the jQuery library.

The result looks very nice and the animation is very smooth. The only issue is that this tutorial takes so many steps and makes use of inline JavaScript, though I suppose they can easily be converted to DOM-based JQuery statements, separating the presentation layer from the backend.
Posted in JavaScript, Cool, Tricks, Effects, AJAX, Animation, Tutorial | No Comments »
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
Stumbled into this article which presents alternative Mootools code for styling scrollbars.
Personally though I prefer jScrollPane, but that’s because I’m a JQuery user.
Posted in Customization, Framework, Tricks, AJAX, Tutorial | No Comments »
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
iBegin has just released iBox, a “lightweight, fast, and flexible” lightbox script.
It supports the following content types:
Images
It supports image overlaying and will automatically scale down the window if the browser’s viewpane is too small.

Documents
Displays linked documents in a similar fashion as Images.

Inline Containers
iBox can also display containers (e.g. hidden DIVs) within the same page.

YouTube Videos (Flash Video)
iBox’s architecture supports plugins. Images, Documents, and Inline Containers are all plugins, and YouTube Videos is provided as an example for developers to make their own plugins.

One notable aspect of iBox is its support for non-JavaScript capable browsers. It supports a target attribute which specifies the target document to be loaded, so that you can specify a different value for the HREF attribute. Very nifty.
Links:
Posted in Web2.0, Cool, Interface, Forms, JavaScript, Flash, Free, AJAX, Animation, Effects, Tools | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
I have long shunned ASP.Net for the ugly and ancient HTML code that it uses for rendering controls. Enter the CSS Friendly Control Adapters kit (CFCA?) for ASP.Net 2.0, which “… provides pre-built control adapters that you can easily use to generate CSS-friendly markup from some of the more commonly used ASP.NET controls …”
Started late 2006 as a Microsoft project, it was released *gasp* open-source and required a lot of extra steps to incorporate into a project. Frustrated by this, an independent developer, Brian DeMarzo, repackaged the code so that it compiled into a single DLL, thus the present form of CFCA.
Although the website pretty much lacks updates, the project is still alive, with the latest release dated Jan 25.
You may download the code here.
Posted in ASP.Net, Framework, Compatibility, AJAX, CSS | No Comments »
Sunday, February 24th, 2008

jQuery happens to be my favorite JavaScript framework, so I was very happy when Noupe came up with a list of 50+ Amazing Jquery Examples. The article has “Part 1″ attached to it so expect to see more. The list ranges from useful to awesome to just cool, such as the following:
- Date Picker - a flexible unobtrusive calendar component for jQuery
- Style Switcher - allows your visitors to choose which stylesheet they would like to view your site with. It uses cookies so that when they return to the site or visit a different page they still get their chosen stylesheet
- Table Sorter - turns your standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes
- Form Validation
- Image Galleries
- and more …
Posted in Cool, Resource, Framework, Web2.0, JavaScript, Animation, Effects, Reference, AJAX | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 21st, 2008

MooFlow is an image gallery that mimics the look of Apple’s iTunes Cover Flow. It runs on top of Mootools.
Posted in Gallery, Interface, Effects, Animation, AJAX | No Comments »
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
Shadowbox is a lightbox-style multimedia viewer inspired by LightWindow. This includes images, Flash videos, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, and even webpages.
From the website:
Shadowbox is a cross-browser, cross-platform, cleanly-coded and fully-documented media viewer application written entirely in JavaScript. Using Shadowbox, website authors can display pictures and movies in all major browsers without navigating away from the linking page.
Aside from support for Firefox 1.5+, Safari 2+ and IE 6+, it comes with adapters for most widely adapted JavaScript frameworks, allowing for easy integration and optimized code execution.
- Yahoo! User Interface Library
- Ext (standalone)
- Prototype + Scriptaculous
- jQuery
- MooTools (requires Fx.Styles and its dependancies)
- Dojo Toolkit (thanks Peter Higgins)
Posted in Cool, Gallery, JavaScript, Flash, Free, AJAX, Tools | No Comments »
Monday, January 28th, 2008

Lightview is an AJAX image viewer similar to the ever so famous Lightbox JS. It features very nice, PNG-less, customizable rounded corners, a slideshow mode, pulsing captions, and a very clean and smooth blackout animation and slideshow transition.
One thing that I really like about Lightview is that the image remains stationary when scrolling unlike in Lightbox where the image scrolls with the content.
Still, the script was implemented on Scriptaculous and Prototype, which, given the size of these things may not be the way to go for sites optimized for speed. For those looking for a lighter lightbox alternative, Slimbox may be the better choice.
Posted in Effects, JavaScript, Cool, Animation, AJAX, Tools, Free, Design, CSS | 3 Comments »