Outsource your charting to Google!  Yesterday I discussed my initial experiences with the Flot charting library.   Today, I’m going to give you a brief introduction to the excellent new Google Charting API.How it works, simply embed an image tag in your source that references the google chart API location followed by a set of parameters specifying the actual chart.  Google then renders the chart as a PNG that can be displayed in the browser.Features:

Alright, So Flot 0.1 has been out in the wild for just under 2 days now and it’s gotten some pretty decent traction with the Ajax blogs.  I’ve taken some time over the past 24 hours to work with the library and I have to say, It’s pretty awesome. Highlights:  

• The presets really are excellent , simple charts are very little work.
• The charts look great, the integrated support for shadows & alpha channels really makes them shine
• The underlying architecture is excellent.  I’ve been able to get under the hood and add needed features without any major headaches. 
• jQuery based

Shown: A chart created with a modified version of Flot with normal range highlighted. You can get flot at: http://code.google.com/p/flot/

It’s official, ExtJS 2.0 has landed.  ExtJS is one of the best toolkits out there for achieving ajax applications that rival desktop applications in interface richness.  Some of the new features in 2.0.

•  Grouping & Group Summary fields: Allows you to group related grid items and create summary rows.  Data sorts within each group set instead of across the grid.
• Scrolling tabs: You can now optimize screen Real Estate by allowing tabs to scroll off the tab par (Ala firefox)
• Anchor Layouts: Tack the dimensions of form elements to their parent container.
• Column Tree: The best of both worlds, integrate the powerful extjs grid & tree widgets

I should also point out that ExtJS continues its tradition of excellent documentation with a new API documentation center and rich set of demo applications to work from.   Check out ExtJS 2.0 here:http://extjs.com/blog/2007/12/04/ext-20-final-released/

 Proto.Menu is an amazing prototype based context menu.  It’s packaged as a prototype extension and is quite honestly, one of the best ways to through a context menu into the mix on your next project.Features:  

• iFrame Shim so IE6 plays nice
• explicit z-Index control
• Callbacks (”beforeShow”, “beforeHide”, “beforeSelect”)
• Improved Callbacks for Menu Items
• “className” option
• Semantic Markup

You can find the new version here: http://thinkweb2.com/projects/prototype/2007/12/03/protomenu-gets-facelift/ P.S.Whether or not you use prototype in your development process, I encourage all of you to take a few minutes and read  Kangax’s excellent write up of the release.  It’s a valuable look into the decision process that went into making an excellent widget significantly better.  

Niall Doherty just released a minor update to the powerful & sexy jQuery CodaSlider widget. The version 1.1.1 release increases the visual styling capabilities of the widget by adding more css support.

Not a major update, but the drop in nature and dramatically increased styling ability make this an obvious addition to any projects currently using the widget.

Get it at ndoherty.com:

Edit in Place rich text areas has been a bit of a holy grail for me lately. Several of my project call for the ability to provide rich text on demand.  You can already do this with the YUI rich text editor using some positioning magic.  In this Prototype extension,  the entire rich text area toggles to replace the inline content.

Rails support is provided out of the box.

Check it out here:  http://inplacericheditor.box.re/

Via: Scripteka

Stu Nicolls released this excellent CSS menu.  It’s javascript free and provides incredibly rich interaction for something solely CSS based.

Check it out here: http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/pro_drop6#nogo53 

David Spurr’s Image Cropper is a powerful and easy to use widget for image cropping.

Some Features:

•  Un-obtrusive
• Selection can be moved & resized
• Drag & Drop interface
• Size can be restricted to ratio
• Size can be restricted to minimum dimensions
• Size can be restricted to maximum dimensions
• Dynamic Preview
• All operations bounded by image

Get it here: http://www.defusion.org.uk/code/javascript-image-cropper-ui-using-prototype-scriptaculous/

Following in his tradition of delivering, simple, easy to use widgets for beautiful design driven development, Brian McAllister has released this spectacular table widget.

Here are some of the key features:

• Unobtrusive and nameSpace friendly
• Powerful Zebra Striping Support
• Supports row hover and column hover effects
• The “current” cell can be highlighted
• Multiple Rows can be selected / highlighted
• Intelligently deals with rowSpans and ColSpans
• Table rows can be selected “onclick” with callback support
• Extremely fast & responsive

Check it out at http://www.frequency-decoder.com/2007/11/15/unobtrusive-table-actions-script

As excellent as Xinha, YUI RTE, Tiny MCE, FCK & the other heavyweight Rich Text Widgets are, they can be massive overkill for many projects Weighing in at only 7k (uncompressed). This jQuery Editor is an incredibly light weight and responsive alternative to the big guns for most projects.

Features:

• Stylesheet based formatting
• Image support
• Link Support
• Strong, emphasis
• Bulleted list
• Source view

Supported Browsers

• IE6+
• Safari 3+
• Firefox
• Opera

Check it out online here:

http://batiste.dosimple.ch/blog/posts/2007-09-11-1/rich-text-editor-jquery.html