UI! Possibilities! (Yahoo Photos)
10 Cool Things About The New Yahoo! Photos: Yahoo’s new photo site sports some neat visual effects–not only drag and drop, but grouped drag and drop, fancy placeholder effects, etc. (Watch the first screencast!) It’s all JavaScript (though apparently it doesn’t use Yahoo’s user-interface library).
I’ve been playing around with some Ajax/JavaScript libraries recently, and I’ve been pretty impressed. They do a good job of abstracting away browser differences, and they make difficult things possible (if not easy). You don’t completely miss out on the fun of browser weirdnesses and incompatibilities though, even for simple effects. A few days ago I was experimenting with a transparent, moveable post-it note that appears in the same place throughout a site. It wasn’t working right in Safari though it was fine in IE and Firefox; after some experimentation I discovered that (for no particular reason) Safari needed the setup calls in a particular order.
Still, when it was done–how pretty! I felt like a kitten with a ball of string, dragging my post-it note this way and that.
Hi mjs,
Yahoo! Photos doesn’t use all of YUI because it was developed largely before YUI was released. It DOES use YUI’s Connection (Ajax) control, and I expect Photos to migrate to more YUI controls in the future.
YUI *is* used on lots of live Yahoo sites, as we’ve documented on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog (here
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2006/05/15/peeling-back-the-homepage-beta/ and here http://yuiblog.com/blog/2006/07/18/ten_things/)
Thanks,
Nate
Nate Koechley
Yahoo! Engineering