Well it doesn’t get any better than this. I have been over whelmed by the response that community has given to ProtoFlow. While I am still working to fix some issues with image positioning, Fabian and  Martin posted a add-on for keyboard and mouse wheel support. After integrating their code I had to release it to general public asap. Thank you guys for your contribution.

By default both keyboard and mouse wheel support is turned on. To turn keyboard support off you can set options: enableKeyboard to false and to disable the mouse wheel events just turn enableMouse to false. Notice how the mouse wheel effect only works when your mouse is over the ProtoFlow object.

The latest code should be up here.

I have released another small update to the script. It has now been tested in IE6 and IE7 along with Firefox 2.0 and Safari. I have also added docs to the project.

I think this script should be in stable condition now. If you stumble upon any bugs or have any suggestions please post them in your comments to this thread.

You can find the latest version for download here.

Ajaxian posted the result from Nitobi AJAX survey. It is interesting to see the results from this survey. What caught my attention was the Javascript framework question.

What toolkits or frameworks are you using in your projects?

This was quite a different result than from our last survey.

• jQuery: 144
• Prototype: 143
• Scriptaculous: 127
• YUI: 99
• Ajax for ASP.Net (Atlas): 91
• Mootools: 65
• Dojo: 63
• ExtJs: 61
• Nitobi: 61
• Spry: 29
• GWT: 19
• JMaki: 6
• Mochikit: 2

Even though I consider Prototype and Scriptaculous to be one framework (since you can’t run Scriptaculous without Prototype) it is interesting how many developers are using these frameworks. Honestly, I wasn’t surprised at JQuery being at the top, it is a very useful toolkit and so is Prototype. On the other hand, I was disappointed that YUI scored so low. I think YUI is a very well thought out framework that can really provide a very solid foundation for web applications.

What are your thoughts? What framework/toolkit do you use for your AJAX application?

Complete survey results can be found here.

Firebug is the most useful Javascript debugging tool out there. Occasionally when doing a large piece of Javascript development I tend to use the console utility which cause other browsers (such as IE) to crash your script. So here is a small piece of code that I have found to be extremely useful in making other browsers immune to the errors. Simply add this at the start of your script and let the magic begin!

if (!("console" in window) || !("firebug" in console)) {
	var names = ["log", "debug", "info", "warn", "error", "assert", "dir", "dirxml",
			"group", "groupEnd", "time", "timeEnd", "count", "trace", "profile", "profileEnd"];
	window.console = {};
	for (var i = 0; i < names.length; ++i) {
		window.console[names[i]] = function() {};
	}
}

I will be posting more Javascript tips in coming days.

Workspace is our little project that has been under some development for past 1 year. We launched a little preview a while back and had a great response - over 2400 users gave us exceptional feedback.

What do you do with all this feedback? Well we listen to the feedback and we quickly realized that we need to do some major work. Therefore, today we are announcing that we will stop sending out further beta invites  to our users. The reason is simple. We want to work hard to get the new features and updates integrated as soon as possible.

So what should you expect in our next release?

• Better UI framework
• Completely new editor
• Better support for FTP and SFTP protocols
• Support for SVN (and CVS)

These are just few of the new things we are currently working on. At this point we are not publishing any release dates but we will make an announcement soon - very soon!

This morning I read via Techcrunch about Google Sky. My first impression? WOW!

I have been into astronomy for a while now and it is amazing to see the complexity and beauty of our sky. On top of that I like how Google just brought a little preview of what Google Earth can do to our browsers.

If you have never seen up at the sky at night time or if you have wondered about the brightest star or other planets I recommend you to visit Google Sky

March 17, 2008: I have updated the script again. It now supports <a> tags. More information can be found here.

After reading through comments on the original launch post I finally got a chance to update the ProtoFlow script for with latest changes.

It now has a better caption system. It now supports image Reflection!

Credit goes out to those who participated in original blog post with all the helpful comments and suggestions. I am using Reflection.js found here. Many thanks to the author.

So fellow developers/users as done previously please provide your feedback and comments.

You can find a better documentation here and code is located at the bottom of the page here

Alright, we have been facing this odd problem lately. Every now and then our wordpress theme would switch back to default. We have been looking into this issue and think that we have resolved it by editing wp-setting.php file and commenting out

validate_current_theme(); on line 270

But this is just a temporary fix. Anyone else out there who is experiencing similar issues?

ProtoFlow has been updated!

It has been a few weeks since my last post. I got busy with few other client work and didn’t really get any chance to polish up the ProtoFlow widget. So in order to get things moving, I am releasing the code under opensource. I know that there are many talented developers out there who would like to contribute to the code and help us improve it.

So without further delay here is the demo page and the zip file

I look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Update:

Here is the markup for the actual widget:

<div id="protoflow">

<img src="imgs/DSCN0940_91360.jpg"/>

<img src="imgs/stimme_von_oben_187192.jpg"/>

<img src="imgs/Tropfen_1_Kopie_201721.jpg"/>

<img src="imgs/farbraum_012_147508.jpg"/>

<img src="imgs/IMG_4906_199357.jpg"/>

<img src="imgs/Tropfen_1_Kopie_201721.jpg"/>

<img src="imgs/Fries_201253.jpg"/>

<img src="imgs/Fries_201253.jpg"/>

</div><ul id=”protoCaptions” class=”protoCaptions”>

<li>Caption 1</li>

<li>Caption 2</li>

<li>Caption 3</li>

<li>Caption 4</li>

<li>Caption 5</li>

<li>Caption 6</li>

<li>Caption 7</li>

<li>Caption 8</li>

</ul>

You can now initialize the Widget (usually done on page load) via:

Event.observe(window, 'load', function() {

 cf = new ProtoFlow($("protoflow"), {captions: 'protoCaptions'});

});

The options that you can pass in are:

options = {

   startIndex: 2, //which image or stack should the widget focus on after init

   slider: true,    //show or hide the slider widget

   captions: false //do you want to show captions?

};

In fact, the actual “holder” for the images can be anything. You can have a UL with a bunch of LI’s and all those LI’s would be used to create the flow effect. Captions are held in UL (I wanted to use ALT attribute in the images to hold captions but I think this way we can create a ProtoFlow effect out of all sort of HTML elements. Give it a try!

Coming Soon:

• Autoplay - There is some code there right now but its not perfect so that needs to be done for next iteration