Here’s how to do that.

technorati tags:adobeair

I dug up this blog post while trying to tweak Aptana’s performance on my (old) laptop. Check out the first comment to the post; following those recommendations really sped up and improved Aptana’s performance. Definitely worth trying, especially if you’ve got an older machine.

technorati tags:aptana, eclipse

I’ve been building an animation-heavy demo here at work using YUI. Initially, I was using the old “give the animation a duration and let the computer figure things out. But, that doesn’t yield a smooth animation: in fact, it can make things kind of choppy, especially if lots of animations are running at the same time.

That’s when I did a little bit of digging into the YUI Animation object, and it’s timing options. I’d noticed the useSeconds flag kicking around, but I’ve never really used it. I gave it a shot, and it’s great.

var b =  new YAHOO.util.Anim(ch,{
    height:    { to: 175 },
    opacity:   { to: 1.0 },
    top:       { to: 10 },
    width:     { to: 175 }
},
.700,
YAHOO.util.Easing.easeOut);
b.setAttribute('useSeconds',false);
b.animate();

We’ve created b, an Animation, and told YUI that we’re not using seconds, we’ll be using frames instead. The .700 in the duration parameter refers to the number of frames that we’d like to use; the decimal is multiplied by 1000. In this case, that gives us .700 x 1000 or 700 frames. We can fudge this value as much as we’d like, getting the exact number of frames we need to make everything super-smooth (761 or 445); you just can’t get this level of detail using time-based animations.

I’ve now got super-smooth animations, right down to the very frame.

technorati tags:yui, dhtml, animation

We’re pleased to announce today the release of YUI version 2.3.0. This release features six new additions to the library as well as a new skinning architecture and a new visual treatment for most of our UI controls. All of this, plus 250 enhancements and bug fixes, is available for download immediately.

YUI 2.3.0: Six New Components and a Prettier Face » Yahoo! User Interface Blog

YUI introduced a new rich text editor component / widget with this release. Rich text editors are notorious pains to work with, especially when you’re trying to support multiple browsers. Since, YUI has guaranteed “A-grade” browser support (IE 6 and 7, FF, Safari, etc.), this may be the rich text editor widget to use.

technorati tags:yui, javascript, richtexteditor, widget