When creating Wiretap, I wanted some kind of inline help system which would not only help users but would not detract from the layout of the form. I’ve seen lots of systems where there’s a little question mark next to the form elements, or where there is a big lump of text underneath every box. So I wanted mine to be unobtrusive and flexible. (more…)

I’ve been using libraries such as NewtonSoft’s JSON.NET or AjaxPro to serialize a class to JSON. There’s something about my approach which didn’t really sit too well, and C# 3 has an elegant solution.
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I’ve updated my javascript TickerTape to version 1.1, and introduced a couple of new features. Firstly, one which was requested by a few people, rolling over the ticker now causes it to stop scrolling until you move out again. This prevents the item you’re interested in zipping off the screen before you can click it.

Secondly, the ticker can now be configured to scroll horizontally, which opens up a whole new slew of applications. You can see both of these features in action in the new horizontal demo, available in the archive. The current version of the TickerTape component can always be found here:

Latest JavaScript TickerTape Component

Incidentally, because IE7 doesn’t allow XMLHttpRequests to the local filesystem, you’ll have to upload the demos to your own webserver rather than view them on your own PC. They work locally in Firefox just fine.

Update: The TickerTape is now available on Google Code. Downloads have been updated to reflect this.

stchur tackles an issue which has cropped up for me in the past – that mouseout and mouseover on a container element will also trigger for its children. This can be incredibly annoying, and it surprised me to find out that Internet Explorer has a built-in solution in the mouseenter and mouseleave events. These are only triggered for the container element, not for the children. However, non-IE browsers don’t support this and so stchur made mouseenter and mouseleave for Firefox. Extremely useful, and I’ll be using his work as inspiration for a new feature in the next TickerTape version.

I’ve updated my Javascript TickerTape component after Ajaxian reported that the demo wasn’t working for them in Firefox. This is v1.01 and contains no other changes. To download this update, hit the current TickerTape version link. Note that if you’ve visited the demo before you may need to flush your cache to see this fix.

Update 2: The TickerTape is now available on Google Code. Downloads have been updated to reflect this.

UPDATE: A new version of the component is available which supports horizontal scrolling.

This component vertically scrolls a number of items within a container. Each page of items is pulled from a server which supplies JSON data. You can find a demo of the TickerTape in the download archive, and the download for the latest version here. There is a readme.txt in the download, or read on for an example usage. (more…)