One of the things I dislike the most when creating the layout for a website is trying to find a good place to put the login/register details. You can never quite find the right spot to put it. However, Jeremie Tisseau from web-kreation.com, has developed a sliding login panel using jQuery which overcomes this problem.

The login/registration panel sits at the top of the screen, only showing a small tab.

When a trigger in the tab is clicked, the hidden portion of the panel slides down over the current screen contents, displaying login and registration fields.

Not only does this function well, it looks great too. Jeremie has also done a tutorial explaining how to integrate his sliding panel into Wordpress.

For more information: www.web-kreation.com

I’ve been using EXT 2.0 for some time now having created reporting systems and even a full blown Administration System. EXT produces Web 2.0 styled content all within your browser. Now comes EXT Core 3.0 Beta,  a subset of the soon to be released EXT 3.0.

The developers of EXT 3.0 have gone through the code, stripping out everything except for the core functionality, optimised the code and gzipped it to bring it down to a modest 25kb in size. They have also changed the licensing to use the MIT License (which drew some ire from some developers but was generally accepted by the majority).

Some of the features of EXT Core 3.0 are:

• DOM manipulation and traversal
• CSS management
• Event handling
• Dimensions and Sizing
• AJAX and JSON Support
• Animations
• Classical Inheritance Class System
• Observable Class
• Markup generation and Templating
• Timed code execution
• URL encoding and decoding

EXT Core 3.0 Beta core functionality contains:

• Carousel
• Lightbox
• Menus
• JSONP
• Simple Tabs

For those of you that need more extensive features, then EXT 3.0 is more your ticket. However, for anyone else who needs to put together a lightweight interface that has the Web 2.0 look and feel, then EXT 3.0 Core is definitely worth looking at.

For more information: EXT Core 3.0 Beta

Firefox 3.0.9 is now out with quite a few security fixes and improvements. To update, go to Help -> Check for Updates or grab it from http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/

Here is the list of changes:

• Fixed several security issues.
• Fixed several stability issues.
• Many users experienced an issue where a corrupt local database caused Firefox to “lose” its stored cookies.
• Fixed an issue where, starting with Firefox 3.0.7, inline image attachments on popular webmail services (like AOL and AIM) would not display.
• Large forms would sometimes take a long time to submit.
• In certain cases, new windows would not have proper focus.

It seems after years of denying any support for Blu-ray, Microsoft may be finally softening their stance. Check out this Microsoft TV commercial (the interesting part is at 0:43):

Interesting stuff. We may even see a Blu-ray addon for the XBOX 360 in the coming months.

You can read more at CNET.

To be able to use Flash to it’s fullest, you need to be able to control animation (or tweening as it’s better known) from within Actionscript. There have been many solutions these last few years, with Tweener being the most well known and popular. Now comes a faster and smaller tweening platform: TweenLite. Written by Jack Doyle, this new tweening platform has taken everyone by surprise.

It comes in two different versions: TweenLite and TweenMax. The difference between the two is basically the level of functionality and the amount of features (TweenLite/Max features). TweenLite has less functionality and features, and therefore is smaller in file size (5k with default plugins). TweenLite is perfect for your more basic projects. TweenMax, has far more functionality and features, but the offset is the increased file size (14k with default plugins).

To keep file size small, TweenLite and TweenMax are broken up into plugins. Each plugin contains certain features like filter blurring, color transformation and bezier tweening to name a few. The great thing about using plugins is that you only include the plugins that you need to use for your project. This reduces your Flash file size and also helps speed up tweening.

TweenLite supports both AS2 and AS3. AS2 support is great for those who still need to work with Flash Player installs earlier than Flash Player 9, though obviously the speed is much slower. The AVM2 engine (AS3) is much more efficient in performance, and you can see this in the speed tests on Jack’s site.

Speaking of performance, Jack has also created a Speed Comparison which compares all the major Tweening Platforms against TweenLite. TweenLite is incredibly fast. You can see the Speed Comparison here.

The use of TweenLite is limited to projects and games that don’t charge end users money. You can also donate to help keep Jack in development of TweenLite. The amount you donate determines which plugins you can use in your projects as not all plugins come standard with TweenLite/Max.

Having read Jack’s blog recently, it seems that several Tweening Platforms (Twease and gTween) will be merging with TweenLite/Max. This is great news as TweenLite will benefit from the coorporation of the developers.

The latest stable version is Version 10, with Version 11 Beta in the works. Some of the new features from Version 11 Beta are:

• the addition of the “TimelineLite” and “TimelineMax” classes. They make building and managing sequences/groups of tweens simple.
• “useFrames” feature.
• a new “motionBlur” plugin that applies a realistic directional blur based on the velocity and angle of a DisplayObject’s x/y movement.
• a new “dynamicProps” plugin that allows you to associate a function with a property so that every time the tween is updated, it calls that function to get the end value for the associated property.

Having used TweenLite, I can vouch for it’s speed and size. All the signs for this project look very promising and I look forward to seeing how it develops over the coming months. Great work Jack!

For more information: GreenSock Tweening Platform