I was browsing around the internet and came across Iconza by turbomilk. As it seemed rather nice and my Framework Detector Firefox add-on sniffed out mootools, I had a look at the source.
It uses what looks like a colour picker plugin for mootools called mooRainbow. Nice to have in your toolkit, you never know. Iconza’s png trickery is not too shabby either, nice site (as you’d expect from Turnomilk anyway).
Nathan White announced the mootools 1.2.3 release today. This is to be the last version prior to bumping everything into mootools 2.0.
Although mootools 1.2.3 is mostly about bug fixing, it does introduce an important feature: “Element: MooTools compatibility mode: the $ function is only defined if no pre-existing $ function is found. If an existing $ function is found, you can use document.id()”
In reality this means that mootools will be able to co-exist with frameworks such as jQuery (or others). It will still not work alongside Prototype, for example – extending prototypes just cannot be namespaced. Also, even though you now CAN use more than one framework at a time, you probably shouldn’t do so on the same page, its a wasteful and needless practice.
Aaron Newton has written up what appears to be one of the most comprehensive and unbiased answers to the eternal question: jquery or mootools. I cannot recommend it enough to anyone that’s just starting with javascript or is looking at both frameworks from the “which is better for me and my project’s needs” angle. It’s worth mentioning before you begin, this is a comparison of the core functionality, provided by each framework – not what is possible should you decide to build on it.
The short summary: both frameworks are great but serve a different purpose, with jquery is more user and beginner-friendly, focused / optimised around DOM access and mootools, building and extending the javascript native prototypes and methods (not at the expense of the things that jquery can do).
Another way to look at it: mootools takes things further than jquery and makes javascript fun, introduces features that are coming in javascript 1.8 and provides a great layer for object orientated programming whereas jquery is staying where it’s at its best: shortcuts, chaining and styling, leaving anything else you may need to plugins and vanilla javascript.
The comments are also well worth the read, some good points on the pro’s and con’s of each framework and a bit on why mootools does not try to be unobtrusive / conflict free with other frameworks.
Just a quick update, in case you missed it: mootools 1.2.2 is out, mostly a bug fixing release. Also, the new mootools-more is out. So… check them out.
Just caught wind of this one on ajaxian, notiMoo 1.1 is a mootools 1.2 class that easily allows you to display notifications and messages to your visitors. The good thing about it is that they can be as intrusive and difficult to ignore as you need them to be, or vice versa. Worth knowing about anyway…
If you don’t know about grow, it’s an apple thing. Again… Don’t you just hate it that so many of the really good interfaces out there are born somewhere within the Apple empire…
It’s what it says, really. Now go and find your street and house. No, really, go…
From the bookmarks gallore… PBB MagicWheel is an Apple-style fully featured carousel effect.
Granted, it uses a lot of space so it is not something you’d need every day. But with the Apple Wheel coming soon, it may be all the rage…
And MooStack – an image (or any other content) swapping script that leaves you feeling like you are shuffling a pack of cards. Great idea for an effect, will certainly make for some unusual gallery scripts.
Just a round-up. First off, Aaron Newton announced yesterday on the mootools blog that the new mootools-more has been released (as RC1) on the mootools site. It features updates, fixes and mostly, new additions that were previously unavailable outside of the CNET/Clientside libraries. This does not mean to say he lifted the CNET code and pasted it into the mootools repository – a lot of it has been refactored and fixed.
Second, in having to work with forms in a hurry recently, I went and played with 2 such mootools ‘plugins’ from my bookmarks (whilst I was avoiding having to reinvent the wheel and being lazy…)
mootools formcheck is a class-based semantic solution which relies on css classes to define a ruleset for each input field. For example: <input type=”text” class=”validate['required', 'length[4, -1]‘, ‘differs[email]‘, ‘digit’]” />. Pretty flexible and pretty cool, thumbs up from me and the idea of a hash based ruleset within the element’s class is just great.
mootools iMask by Fabio Nagao is something similar to formcheck, but it takes matters further. iMask actually attaches itself to the input element and helps the user populate their data as per a pre-set ‘mask’. The mask is just a patterned format that cannot be broken. In reality, it allows you to ask your user to enter really complex data blocks, for example, you can have a field that contains (+NN)-NNN-AZ, hyphens, brackets and plus sign included. The end-user can only enter numerics or alpha characters in their designated places. Check it out, it’s really impressive.
Stubbornella, who fancies herself as a bit of a CSS guru, has some up with a concept that has thus far received nothing but praise from all sorts of people. You can check it out on her blog, not the worst of ideas… Only wish the slidecast had audio with it…
Having just played some QuakeLive, it hit me… All this work in producing a new engine–even if it’s browser based, which is a novelty in itself–the reworking an old game like Quake 3 to demo it… There just isn’t any monetary value for id software. So why bother at all, aside from the fact that Quake 3 it may have been the greatest game ever and probably deserves the work–nobody really cares. New rendering and networking engines crop up all the time. And then I realised, QuakeLive will be the first game of its calibre EVER that truly cannot be copied, pirated, cracked or hacked (well, maybe hacked is an option insofar as compromising accounts or cheating goes). There simply isn’t anything to copy or upload to FTPs, all the code remains at the remote end!
So, I imagine id software are feeling pretty good about themselves right about now, how hard a sale is it–how many games development companies can afford to not want to safeguard their work and maximise their earning potential? Great, great idea… Oh, and you can show browser adverts. That’s your upsale right there. What’s next, in-game advertising? Surely not…
