It’s a shame Mootools doesn’t seem to have gained the same sort of traction, as I prefer it (with my limited experience of both) slightly as a framework. While some cry foul of it’s extending things in the global namespace I find it makes for much more native and cleaner feeling code, and makes it feel more powerful (although there’s very, little if anything, you could achieve with one and not the other). In the end it’s down to personal preference and many people prefer jQuery’s “less javascripty” style and smaller learning curve, especially those with little coding experience. I could go on for a while about the differences between the two, but this is a much better comparison than I could ever come up with. It’s definitely worth reading if you’re stuck with which framework to use, or are just curious about the differences between the two.

Anyway go download Picbox if you haven’t already, and yell at me if it breaks. Meanwhile, I’ll try and think of something else to make.

I did find something rather cool while importing all my photos from the trip in picasa though. Using the collage feature and selecting the multiple exposure some nice abstract almost marble-like textures can be made. It might take a bit of playing around with what pictures to use, and it needs a fair few images but you can quickly end up with the sort of thing that web designers probably spend a while producing. Here’s a nice image I ended up with after a couple of minutes of playing:

I do have an idea an a quick mockup for a new project though, it’s not a big one but I’m coming across a few tricky problems with different browser’s preferences of <object> and <embed> (which I might talk about in a future blog post). I’m also trying to decide whether or not to use mootools for it; as it will hopefully end up being a relatively small file either way, I’m not sure the extra size overhead of the framework is worth it.

In other news I’m currently enjoying a blisteringly fast broadband connection of 128kbps after going over our monthly usage limit barely halfway through the month! Thankfully I’m going away in 3 days, thus hopefully saving the world from my agonisingly-slow-internet induced murderous rampage… oh and did I mention ftp is blocked too?

See you in just over 2 weeks! (just in time for exam results results day…(woo?) :S )

Buuuut Picbox v1 is released! It’s yet another javascript image viewer (in the same vein as Lightbox et al) that I developed because I got annoyed with how they all handled large images. If you want to try it out there’s a download page and it’s also got a nice demo on it. Any feedback will have to wait until I get back and can finish sorting everything out though.. But give it a try!