Scrapplet’s Variation on the Square World

HTML is square; everything fits in tight little boxes that butt up against each other. Now, Scrapplet introduces the ability to add images to your pages and then rotate them 360 degrees in any direction. Add as many images as you want and rotate them to your hearts content!



Simply drag or use the wizard to add an image to your page, then access PROPERTIES -> ROTATION and specify the number of degrees to rotate the image!

Kwicks Concept Extended and Enhanced in xWinLib, Support for Floating Menus Added

I really like the Kwicks menuing system that is available for MooTools and JQuery, but I wanted even more flexibility and the ability to integrate it into the xWinLib windowing library. So, an exercise in 176 lines of code got me the following:

• Support for horizontal and vertical menus
  
• Sliding menus can be absolutely or relatively positioned
  
• Support for floating sliding menus
  
• Multiple menus can co-exist within a single page
  
• Menu "tabs" can be different sizes
  
• Auto-scale within specific width or height
  
• Customizable animation settings
  
• Auto-open to any tab
  
• Tabs open by rollovers or clicks
  
• Override custom class and style attributes
  
• Works with Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, Chrome
  
• Requires Javascript
  
• Less than 1.5k gzip payload
  

Here’s the link to the demo page with full source code provided: http://www.xwinlib.com/demos/slidingmenu

Microsoft's BING Receives Enhanced Drag and Drop Support from Scrapplet and xWinLib

BING from Microsoft is the latest product to challenge Google’s control of the search market. Initial reviews were mixed but it does introduce a number of interesting features and it seems to be gaining some traction (not the least of which as the result of its automated integration with existing Microsoft searches!).

In any case, Scrapplet/xWinLib has added enhanced drag and drop support for images found using the BING search engine. Just search for an image and then drag it onto a Scrapplet or xWinLib-enabled page!

Google Web Elements Come to Scrapplet

Last week, Google announced the release of a new collection of gadgets, Web Elements. Quoting from the official Google website: "Google Web Elements allow you to easily add your favorite Google products onto your own website."

These include: calendar, conversation, custom search, maps, news, presentations, spreadhsheets, and YouTube News.

With this release I couldn't resist implementing them in a "friendlier" format within Scrapplet. It took me all of a couple of hours to create drag and droppable objects with customization wizards. Here's an example:



And now anyone can embed them with drag and drop ease via Scrapplet and the underlying xWinLib technology. Access your Scrapplet account and go to OBJECTS -> OBJECT REPOSITORY -> WIDGETS to try them out for yourself!