Matchbox Updated

Just pushed an update to matchbox. Version 1.1.0 introduces the navigationLoop option, allowing the navigation arrows to loop end-to-end through the image set. I laos fixed a couple bugs; one where the loadingHTML would only show on the first load, and another were opening the same image twice would prevent it from loading. The there were also minor changes in the code and readme to make things clearer.

Matchbox Released!

I’ve been toying around with the idea of a light box that didn’t us JS to center the image and finally got it all sorted out. Of course you know it’s got to be more than a basic light box, so I added a couple features and tried to make it as easy as possible to use.

First, in it’s default configuration, you can make any element trigger a lightbox by simply adding the attribute data-fullsize to it. If you want to do something a little different thats completely customizable, including using a function to get the larger version of the image.

It also have a few extra buttons in the lightbox view, the first of which is the open-in-new-window button in the top left which does exactly what you think it would, usefully for when the image is actually really large and there no way to see it all and see it at 100%.

On the side it has a couple arrows that light to navigate through all the images on the page that have the light box attached to them.  Simple and something I would except to see more of in light box plugins. Both the arrows and the new-window button can be disabled in the plugins settings.

You can see it in action here: https://rawgit.com/pgooch/Matchbox/master/index.html and see the code, forkit it, and all that good stuff here: https://github.com/pgooch/Matchbox.

Creating Awesome JavaScript based charts with Highcharts

Recently I’ve been creating a lot of custom reports. You know the kind, sales reports, analytics reports, accountability reports. Reports that are rather boring, after all how do you make a table interesting. Why charts of course! For this I’ve been using Highcharts for hitting all the main points, it’s Free, jQuery compatible (heck, it’s jquery based), and well documented. So lets talk about charts. Continue reading “Creating Awesome JavaScript based charts with Highcharts”