CloudZoom, A new jquery zoom is here on the market, with features such as image blur, zooming inside the image. It works a bit like jqZoom, which is now a de facto standard for image zooming, but CloudZoom claims to be lighter and certainly is nicer to view.

http://www.professorcloud.com/mainsite/cloud-zoom.htm

w-script is a nice example of how a good development framework like codeigniter can deliver solid applications. W-Script is a simple wall paper script that comes free opensource with many functions, one them is the color indexing that allows searching colors in pictures.

http://www.wallpaperscript.net/

Create, publish, enjoy : this is the  mission line of ionize CMS, built entirely around Code Igniter, looks very promising as it comes with basic features : drag & drop pages tree, media navigator, permissions…

http://ionizecms.com/

Prestashop has a nice feature that allows administrator to view a customer’s shopping cart : while the shopping cart is relatively easy to use for novices, the number of steps involved in completing the transaction can discourage some users, who might be tempted to ask you for help. What can you do apart from helpinog the guy to fill in forms ? The technique below illustrates how to simulate a payment using the Cheque payment type, via the creation of a hard coded validation page. Be careul, this is for good PHP coders only as you have to interfere with low level classes from Prestashop.

1. go to Modules / cheque / validation.php and duplicate the file to validationManual.php
2. Paste the  code blow under the includes  to instanciante the shopping cart using the ID of the shopping cart you want to transfer to an order, here we have the id 9304
3. change the currency id to reflect the currency you want to use, you’ll find the currency id in the currency module of the prestashop administration interface
4. call the module/cheque/validationManual.php from the browser, s if it was called after a valid paymen
5. Go to Prestashop administration interface to check that the order has been created
6. you might be wise to try to place a new order for testing that the manual process has not disturbed prestashop’s database integrity

   // 1 . get currency ID
   $currency = new Currency(1);
   // 2 get cart id
   $cart = new Cart( 9304);
   $total = floatval(number_format($cart->getOrderTotal(true, 3), 2, '.', ''));
   $mailVars =    array(
   '{cheque_name}' => Configuration::get('CHEQUE_NAME'),
   '{cheque_address}' => Configuration::get('CHEQUE_ADDRESS'),
   '{cheque_address_html}' => nl2br(Configuration::get('CHEQUE_ADDRESS')));
   
   $cm = new Cheque();
   $cm->validateOrder($cart->id, _PS_OS_CHEQUE_, $total, $cm->displayName, NULL, $mailVars, $currency->id);
   $order = new Order($cm->currentOrder);

The new jQuery plugin  “visualize” demonstrates usage of a specific technique that renders visual graphs (pie charts, bars, area, lines) from HTML table data. The process uses JavaScript to scrape data from an HTML table and generate charts using the HTML 5 Canvas element. It  is particularly useful because the data for the visualization already exists in the page in structured tabular format, making it accessible to people who browse the web with a screen reader or other assistive technology. Also the port to Jquery is particularly simple as it is accessible to HTML generated tables, which is most common. The only drawback for this method would be the CPU power required to render large sets of data. But there is a workaround in the form of data aggregation if the origin is SQL based.

Application developpers like to illustrate the process and layout of the work they are planning. Customers like to have a visual sample of what’s coming, and that’s exactly the kind of step that clarifies discussions when negociating work and contracts.  Balsamiq mockups is a basic ilsutration application  that you can use to very quickly build a UI mockup. A lot of softwares do that, wbut this one is rellay simple to use and very light to install, the free version is actually browser based ! Mockup below took approximately… 15 minutes !

If you’ve been working on maps publishing for websites, you might have considered one of these alternatives:

• buy vector format maps and publish them as images with the azppropriate information. this example on ecolopop.info also implements a hand coded image map : this is a lot of work but produces a unique version of the map that reinforces your web site’s graphics.
• use a free online amp provider such as google Map. Very useful for adress positionning : I use it on ecolopop.info for specific business locations. Google Maps in unbeatble at finding stuff from alphanumeric coordinates : if you happen to have a large database of adresses, Google Map will find them for you on its maps
• OpenLayers is a JavaScript library for displaying map data in most modern web browsers, with no server-side dependencies. OpenLayers implements a (still-developing) JavaScript API for building rich web-based geographic applications, similar to the Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth APIs, with one important difference — OpenLayers is Free Software, developed for and by the Open Source software community.
  OpenLayers is a project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

  Furthermore, OpenLayers implements industry-standard methods for geographic data access, such as the OpenGIS Consortium’s Web Mapping Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) protocols. Under the hood, OpenLayers is written in object-oriented JavaScript, using components from Prototype.js and the Rico library.

We are quite proud here that our months old specific jquery gallery script for silverstripe -the best PHP opensource CMS  as of today, just out with a new release- is still, in my opinion, the best we could deliver to customers. In the meanwhile a troup of well intentioned contributors posted their own implementation of gallery for silverstripe cms : one of them is Aaron Carlino who has worked on upload scripts  that are very interesting for the customer experience. On Carl’s gallery script, the image upload, ordering and labeling are all administered from the web site front end, which is nice. But also the gallery script he provides comes with 7 variations of the famous lightbox : in the admin you can  just choose between lightbox, shadowbox, thickbox, nyromodal, prettyphoto and fancybox, and once saved and/or published online; the front end will load the chosen lightbox variation. Interesting to try, not very useful for a customer who doesn’t care which script is being used once it’s properly configured.

using images to display products on e commerce applications can successfully be combined with jabvascript lightbox, itself including a flash zoom and pan application : flashden provides a few examples of commercial applications for a very reasonable price (10$ for this one), among which the XML configuration is an interesting way of configuring various parameters such as position of controls, initial zoom percentage and alignment, Easing value. Equally interesting is the free fla source code provided by  Kirill Edelman on his blog, that will give you a few keys if you want to investigate how everything works from the inside.

Another example of useless feature that could become very useful when a critical mass of web geeks start using ti for specific image display : the jquery parallax plugin order images or elements to respond to mouse effects with a 3D effect. Stunning effect for the display of 3d Landscapes, such as displayed on the plugin homepage, or letter 3D movement, as illustrated in this example. The stephband.info author’s website demonstrates a powerful implmeentation of this plugin.

Alain Coadou is a water colour artist who works in the old village of Locronan, in the west of Brittany. Designed by PoleOuest, his portfolio implements Silverstripe content management framework along with our own modified jquery gallery module.