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.

In a previous post about Prototype 1.6.0 RC1, I discussed many of the improvements this release will bring. Prototype 1.6.0 is the most significant release in over two years bringing a completely rewritten Class API, new enchancements to the DOM API and more.

Scriptaculous 1.8.0 was also released on the same day and is fully compatible with Prototype 1.6.0 final. The latest version brings many performance improvements and bug fixes and a few new features, including support for playing .mp3 sounds! Future releases of Scriptaculous 1.x will be bug releases only. A preview version of Scriptaculous 2.0 is expected soon!

Prototip 1.1.0 is expected to be released shortly after the final release of Prototype 1.6.0.

There is also a fantastic new website which recently went live called Scripteka. Scripteka is a site that many users of prototype have been waiting for, a central resource for all libraires, extensions and add-ons created using the prototype framework. It features a full rating system and tagging. Scripteka is itself an application built with prototype.

See the full post on the release of Prototype 1.6.0 for more info.

See the full post on the release of Scriptaculous 1.8.0 for more info.

Prototip can be found at Nick Stakenburg’s Prototip site.