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IzzyMenu is a free web-based tool for creating snazzy looking CSS menus with minimal effort.

Check it out!

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:

• iBox Homepage
• iBox Support Forum
• iBegin Labs

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)

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.

Fawnt is a free font resource site that features nicely designed AJAX-driven interface for its main gallery. Beware though as the main gallery links to external sites which may no longer be working. The main gallery appears to host files on the same server, so they should all be working.

I have seen a lot of OS X inspired dock menus out there but this is the best that I have seen by far, brought to you by our friends at N-Design Studio, a site that got featured here a few months back.

It uses the JQuery library and the Fisheye component so everything gets manipulated at the DOM level. My only gripe here as with other similar implementations is image aliasing due to browser-level resizing, a limitation that we just have to live with.

Check out the demo page to see what I mean.

Inspired by the holiday season, Design Disease has just released “Christmas Days”, as a Christmas-inspired Wordpress theme as a gift to bloggers around the world. It is one sweet theme so make sure to check it out!

The theme has been tested on WordPress 2.3.1 with Firefox , Opera, Safari and IE6/7. It validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Related links:

• Test the Theme
• Download the Theme

I have no idea where it gets its icons or how this site came to be but Iconfinder seems to be a very decent resource for quickly finding free icons.

My only annoyance is that it doesn’t show the license type right away and I have to click a button which brings up an AJAX-ed overlay which is sometimes delayed. It would be so much better if the license type were displayed beside the icon in the search results page. An alternative would be having an advanced search page where users can specify the license type, icon size, etc.

The site should also benefit from having an “icon submission” page where people can contribute though I can understand if the reason this hasn’t been built in yet is because submissions will need to be moderated, and that takes time especially with the amount of spam online forms receive nowadays. I know this for a fact, because 99% of site submissions and comments we receive here at CSS Vault are from spambots.

Alternatively you can check out this blog post on 31 sources of quality, free icons.

Devlounge has compiled a good list of 30 high quality fonts, both free and premium. It’s a very good list, though it is composed mostly of seriff fonts.

If you need CSS based menus definitely check out the ones being offered by CSS Play. Not only are they gorgeous and very professional looking, they are also available free of charge!