After having used the shiny new YUI3 library for a project, it’s about time to share my YUI3 experiences with you. For the project I built an item selector: A modal dialog is openend and the user has to select an item. After selection the dialog is closed and the selected item is passed to a callback function. Here you can find the full source for the item selector. An example to use the selector can be as simple as this:...

Just in case you don’t already know it: Quince - calls itself an UX Patterns Explorer and that’s just what it is. You want to improve the user experience of your applications? Just take a look at this marble. It contains a large number of design patterns for creating great user interfaces. Even the exploration part of this tool is innovative: The patterns are not only ordered alphabetically by name but can be found by the tasks the user wants to accomplish....

For usability reasons it is usually a good idea to add a delete button to each row of a data grid. If the user clicks on such a button, the whole row that contained the button will be deleted. The data grid of ExtJS does not contain such a feature by default, but it could be implemented by adding a special column to the column model. Using this extension, it could be easily done like this:...

If you’re interested in learning ExtJS and by accident know some German, I can recommend you read an article I wrote together with my colleague Stefan Botzenhart. The article is called ‘Kombiniert: Ruby on Rails und Ext JS’ and is published in the famous German IT magazine iX in their actual special edition called Web on Rails. In the article we explain the implementation of meinkabinett, a web application where people can vote celebrities for the European government....

Now that with Ext Core a light-weight version (just 25kB) of ExtJS has been released, I thought it’s time to build a nice example with it. The result is something very useful that you can see in actually a lot of web sites: Display a info text inside of a input text field if it is empty and does not have the focus. Here’s how it looks like: E-Mail: To add this behaviour to a input field you just have to call this single line:...