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Lightview by Nick Stakenburg

Nick has just released Lightview (another neat project) to the public. Lightview allows you to augment your images. It provides an excellent way of creating a slideshow or simply showing a large version of a thumbnail without resorting to popups. Effects are used to create very appealing slideshows and image galleries.

From the Lightview project site:

  • Clean: Designed to compliment your images.
  • Fast: Images and their neighbours are preloaded.
  • Easy to customize: You don’t even have to know CSS.
  • Rounded: Adjustable rounded corners, without PNGs.
  • Smart resizing: Images will always fit on your screen.
  • Slideshow: One button slideshow.
  • Effects: Using Scriptaculous.
  • Works on all modern browsers

Lightview is similar to Lightbox 2 and both are built with Prototype and Scriptaculous. However, there are a few differences I noticed:

  • The morphing effect that Lightview uses is a refreshing change (probably because I have seen the Lightbox effects too many times!).
  • Lightview allows you to customise many of the visual aspects of the viewer programatically. For example, the background colour and corner radius.
  • Lightview supports a customisable slideshow option which Lightbox lacks.
  • Lightview uses the caption attribute of the <a> tag to give images a caption. This attribute is not valid XHTML and thus its usage will produce invalid markup. I would suggest using a convention similar to that used by MooTools Tips: title="image title :: caption"
  • Lightbox has been around for a while and is well tested and proven.

Personally I like the look of Lightview but I wouldn’t use it because I don’t like invalid markup!

If you are interested in something similar for the MooTools framework, try Slimbox.


Posted by Daniel Skinner 2008-01-12 14:41:59


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Categories: Web Development

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5 Comments »

  1. Wordpress users might also be interested in WP-Lightview.

    Comment by Daniel Skinner — January 13, 2008 @ 11:36 am

  2. Thanks for the post Daniel.

    I liked your suggestion to get valid XHTML and have implemented it in todays release. Title and caption now use the :: notation. Or any other character combination you set through options. Lightview now validates, thanks!

    Comment by Nick Stakenburg — January 13, 2008 @ 5:29 pm

  3. That’s good to hear. I like the idea of being able to change the separator too.

    Keep up the good work, Lightview is another great addition to your project portfolio!

    Comment by Daniel Skinner — January 13, 2008 @ 5:43 pm

  4. Hello all.

    I’m trying to contact Nick. The forum is done and it seems GMail is being bounced by SoHosted.com (well, I’m getting “PERM_FAILURE: Gmail tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. The error that the other server returned was: 554″).

    Any chance of some help on Prototip?

    Regards,

    Richard Quadling.

    Comment by Richard Quadling — April 14, 2008 @ 7:11 pm

  5. Richard,

    Did you have any luck with that Prototip extension?

    Comment by Daniel Skinner — April 19, 2008 @ 2:27 pm

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