Friday Video: An In-Depth Look at jQuery UI with Paul Baukus

jQuery UI is a very powerful tool, it is unfortunate that the core alone is heavier than the actual library it is based on. This video is a very good look at what you can do with jQuery UI.

Tips #2: Animating opacity with jQuery? Don’t forget to set your opacity before animating

Animating opacity with jQuery can be a little tricky. If you look closely, the first opacity animation might not happen. You would think that $(‘element’).animating({opacity:0}) would do the trick, but actually that is not really the case. When you animate opacity always remember to set the default opacity before, in CSS you can add opacity:0 to your element.

However, if you remember, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 do not support CSS opacity, they support the weird, IE only, filter:alpha(opacity=70). Unfortunately for us, that will not do the trick and the first opacity animation will not happen.

So there is only one cross browser way to do this that I know, in your DOM ready, add $(‘element’).css(“opacity”, 0).

Hope it helps!

Swell JS part 3, desktop to browser demo

Swell just added a little demo of their drag and drop prototype. It works with Safari4 and Chrome2, this must have something to do with webkit.

Select your browser screen on Windows 7

Microsoft had antitrust problems with IE in Europe for some times now. They finally decided to comply to the European Commission. When you install Windows 7 you will be prompted with a browser screen choice. It’s interesting to see that Chrome and Opera have been included as these 2 have low shares.

I am curious on the effects this will have on Chrome share. With a name like Google on the screen, I would expect it to rise.

The official Microsoft article.

How to: Get CSS3 box-shadow and border-radius accepted as a viable option at your workplace

This is a small pledge for implementing CSS3 on non-critical design elements, I thought it might help other front-end developer to convince their boss, fell free to use it! What you need to understand, from my point of view, is that CSS3 can help save considerable time to your web development team, this article talks about these new tags and how it can save times and frustration.

CSS3 in modal boxes

Box-shadow and Border-radius are new CSS3 tags implemented in every major web browsers beside Internet explorer, it enables developers to create simple shadows and rounded corner around div elements.This type of shadow is often found around lightbox or modal boxes.
Considering modal boxes and such graphic elements are not generally presented to the client, I suggest…

Tips #1: jQuery easings comes with the jQuery UI effects core.

This is the first of a series of small tips on jQuery and CSS. Sometimes there are effects you want to achieve or you have a small bug that should not be there, that is what my tips are aiming at.

Easing with jQuery as always been spotty, you first try to add easings with your animate effect, and… you are not really sure if it is working because there is no apparent error. Beside the default setting, you need a plug-in or jQuery UI to use other easings. The catch is, it is kind of hard to find this information, you have to look in the effects documentation at the bottom end.

The jquery UI core is about 115kb and can be found here (you also get…

Friday video: Windows Live Messenger 10th Anniversary

ICQ anyone? If you had asked me 10 years ago if Messenger would take the place of ICQ one day, I would have said hell no. It seems I was very wrong. Microsoft did a little video for the occasion.

By the way have a look at icq.com for souvenirs.

Fastest Firefox: The Mozilla Community Shows It’s Speed

“We asked Firefox fans to help us spread the word about Firefox 3.5’s amazing speed. Check out the results:”

The official announcement.

4 lines of javascript fail at Opera

Let’s say you are a hardware consultant trying to get Opera to buy your servers, maybe you should look at your web admin to be really sure it work with Opera before sending your quote..

http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/2009/07/20/most-expensive-javascript-ever

Swell drag and drop, desktop to browser

This friday video bonus was from Swell drag and drop, I didn’t really explained much about this API, however what they are doing is very interesting, a drag and drop from desktop directly to browsers is the Holy Grail of the drag and drop. That said, they only have a video to show for now, but I am curious to see how this will turn out.

I kind of “dream” of interpreting an Excel file and create animated charts on the fly that you can share directly with your friends.

What they are trying to do is really hard, I can’t imagine how they are doing it. There is certainly some sort of web services involved in this.

There is a good round up article on ajaxian.

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