It has been quite some time since I have written; I was a little busier than usual the last week. Through the week, I was working on a project and on YUI. I stole some time away to quickly post on two interesting and new components of the YUI library that I had been working on extensively last week.
Image Cropper
The Image cropper lets a user select a a small part of an image, typically used for resizing in most application, or search for similarities, as like.com does. You can see an example of here. I got a little curious to see how this is done. Contrary to what many guessed, there are no multiple, there are not six or eight triangles with decimal opacity leaving out the center to get the effect. The real way it is implemented is a lot simpler. Once the image is initialized using new YAHOO.widget.Im
File Uploader
I had earlier written a post on file uploading. The YUI file uploader is a similar component. The file upload component uses flash to allow multiple select and also to display the progress. This is very similar to the scheme used with the flickr image upload page. On initialization, a small flash object is embedded into the page that shows up a file open dialog box. Since this is a flash dialog, multiple files can be selected.
Apart from these, I was also looking at the YUI Layout Manager, something that was already achievable using YUI CSS foundation. Apart from providing the basic positioning, the extra javascript part allows collapsing and scrolling of panes. This is a pretty interesting framework manager that I would be using in one of the projects that I am working on. Will be posting on this later, when I have used the component inside out....
