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Using the YUI Color Picker Control

The YUI is constantly growing and evolving, and new utilities, tolls and controls are rapidly being developed and added. One of these controls is the Color Picker, used to add a compact and easy-to-use interface for selecting colours. The format of the control is intuitive and is similar to what you’d find in an imaging application such as Photoshop. During the course of this tutorial we’ll be looking at just how easy it is to add colour-picker functionality to your web pages.

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jQuery and the Air Platform Part 5

In this, the final part of the jQuery and Air introduction we’re going to look at packaging our application into a single archive file that people can download and install on their machines. The process is quite simple, but does involve the use of several different technologies to complete successfully. We can also create a new version of our application so that we can test the update mechanism that we implemented in Part 4.

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jQuery and the Air Platform Part 4

In this part of the tutorial, we’re going to look at the process by which Air applications can be updated, and investigate related issues such as how your application can determine whether or not an update is required and how the update file can be downloaded. In the next and final part of the tutorial we can then make a new version of dmxCompanion to check that the update process works as intended. Read More

Creating An Editable Dropdown

Introduction

The Web 2.0 era has created popular demand for various interface widgets designed to improve user experience and (sometimes :-)) make developer’s life easier. In this article we will create such a widget - an editable dropdown list, an interface component allowing user to either enter a value directly or pick one from a dropdown. The most common examples of such a component are the address bar menu in your browser, a font picker in the word processor application or the auto-complete feature.

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jQuery and the Air Platform Part 3

In part two we added the core functionality to our application - the getting and processing of the news feed from DMX Zone. In this part of the tutorial we’re going to finish off the application by adding some additional behaviour, namely wiring up our buttons so that they have hover and selected states and so that they actually do something, and then creating a secondary popup window like an operating system dialog box that will display some information relevant to our application and the resources it uses.

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jQuery and the Air Platform Part 2

In Part 1 of this tutorial we looked at setting up the Air development environment and created some of the basic pre-requisites for our application such the application descriptor file, a basic stylesheet and the skeleton HTML file. In this part of the tutorial we’re going to add the JavaScript that will power the application and give us the functionality we desire. Read More

jQuery and the Air Platform Part 1(updated)

Adobe’s Air API is the hottest way to get your best web based internet applications on to the desktops of your visitors. The runtime allows you to utilize your existing skills in web design to easily create attractive and highly functional cross-operating system applications. Read More

Making the Most of JSON

When I first heard about JSON I was reluctant to give it a try; I was perfectly happy with the XML method of receiving cross-domain external data from the Internet that I had come to know and love. What was the point, I thought, in yet another method of data interchange? What I failed to grasp initially was just how easy JSON is to use and how little processing it actually requires. Read More

Introducing jQuery Part 5

Thanks for reading the final part in the Introduction to jQuery series, in this part of the tutorial we’ll be looking solely at the suite of AJAX functionality provided by the library. One of the worst (and one of the only) downsides of AJAX is that it is implemented differently by different browsers; notably IE and everyone else. The fact that you have to basically write two different functions to achieve one goal can bloat your code and add to its complexity unnecessarily.

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Dialogs and Theming with jQuery UI

In this article I`ll introduce jQuery UI Dialogs. I'll also introduce one of the premiere features of jQuery UI: themes, and will show how they can be used to make a consistent and attractive web application. As in my last article, Drag-and-Drop Shopping Cart with jQuery UI, I'll assume a basic familiarity with jQuery (the base of jQuery UI). You should be comfortable with jQuery syntax and basic selectors.

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Introducing jQuery Part 4

Welcome to Part 4 of the introductory jQuery series; in the last part we looked at the CSS manipulating tools available to us via the library. In this part we’re going to look at the Effects section; this part of the library can really add visual impact and appeal to your pages.

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Flickr & jQuery, a Match Made in Heaven Part 2

Welcome back to the jQuery and Flickr tutorial. In Part 1 we looked at the underlying HTML and CSS required for this example, as well as the PHP proxy and the JavaScript required for getting and displaying the thumbnail images from the Flickr RSS file. In this part of the tutorial we’re going to add some behaviour to our viewer. Like in Part 1, the code used in this part of the tutorial has been extensively tested in the most popular browsers in use on the Windows platform.

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