alex.rabe » jQuery

Goodbye Flash ?

Alex Rabe — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 15:32:35 +0000

I’m working now a couple of weeks on a new slideshow options, which is based on pure Javascript, so it’s possible to view them as well on a iPad/iPhone and other mobile devices. I estimated that it will take just a couple of hours, but I ran into various challenges. I would like to share some of my problems :

First of all I looked for all the great jQuery Plugins on the market, here you find IMHO the best ones. I thought that I just need to grab one of these slideshow plugins and add this to my code, but I came across a couple of problems to replace the existing flash solution. A flash slideshow solves three issues :

Any theme related style sheet didn’t affected the flash layout
It load images step by step
It can resize mixed image formats ( portrait / landscape )

NextGEN Gallery is a plugin which should nearly handle all kind of themes / layout / formats, if you look into the samples above you find a lot of great designed slideshow, but they will not fit to every theme layout. So I need to pickup a solution which requires a minimum of styling, the rest should be pat of the theme author.

Another point : The most jQuery Slideshow plugins are not designed for loading speed, they parse a hidden div/ul list which contain the images. This is ok for 5-10 images, but not for a gallery which can contain 100+ images. A page load will blow up. So I need to add a AJAX based loading for the images. I study a couple of plugins and decided to use jQuery Cycle, it contains a lot of functions and can handle a AJAX loading of images.

In the second step I’m looking for a reliable solution to resize a image to the wanted size and keep the ratio, also jQuery Cycle has here some problems. WordPress.com introduce a slideshow feature and while I study the solution I recognize that they resize the images on server side, no need to handle this later in the script code. Very good for bandwidth, but I need to cache resized images in this case , otherwise your web hoster and your server cpu usage will blow up.

Currently I load the full images step by step and setup then the wanted container height, I’m still working on a solution to center images. You can watch a first result here :

http://nextgen-gallery.com/playground/jquery-cycle/

Any hints / comments for a better solution are welcome

jQuery takes a flight of fancy ?

Alex Rabe — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 17:58:28 +0000

WordPress used it, Google use it and also I use it. I’m a big fan of jQuery and the work of this team. But now I get problems in combination with the interface elements. Firefox shows a couple of problems in combination with V1.2.1 and IE7 didn’t work at all…

After I study the forums around this problem, I found out that the changes since 1.1.4 get in conflict with the interface lib. I found no response from any jQuery developer, the interface lib is dead. Ok, I know that jQuery.UI is the successor and all attention is put on this plugin, but it’s by far not at the level as the older interface lib. I used the sortable / draggable feature in NextGEN Gallery and I hope I get in the future a similar feature with jQuery.UI.

For now I need to go back to Version 1.1.3…

Bugfixes for IIS

Alex Rabe — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 08:46:59 +0000

So I uploaded a new bugfix release which contain only minor changes for IIS, I hope I catched the most of them. I’m already started the 0.8x branch in the last days, but this next release will take a longer time than in the past. I’m reading all feature wishes and requirements and try now to merge the most wanted request into this version.

One of this points is a better AJAX / jQuery function for the pagination, if someone have good ideas or is disposed to help, please contact me. It will speed up the development…