jQuery UI 1.5b4, featuring effects and a new home

Posted on by

jQuery UI 1.5b4

Attention: We originally intended to release 1.5b3 a couple of hours ago, but we had two serious issues that forced use to deprecate it and go for b4. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The third and last beta has finally arrived to jQuery UI 1.5. Hundreds of hours went into fixing more than 50 bugs for this release – it’s all about stability. jQuery UI 1.5b4 is the last release before pushing out a release candidate – and with only 5 major bugs left, you can expect to see the next release in the next couple of days!

Although it’s mainly a stability release, we also introduced many new API helpers, removed the dimensions dependancy and made all plugins a bit smaller by introducing a generic widget factory into the core. Even better, performance of UI components firing events (i.e. “mousemove” in Draggables) was dramatically improved with recent changes in the jQuery core.

With the release candidate following right after this one, we will also push out a live test suite for everyone to use on any platform, helping us to track down issues, and fixing them for the final release. Yes, this means you an expect a stable, solid and performance-optimised 1.5 release this month!

Go grab the whole package (This package includes a custom build jQuery you’ll need, too):

jquery.ui-1.5b4.zip

jQuery Enchant becomes part of jQuery UI

After many weeks of discussions, I’m particulary happy to announce that the unreleased jQuery effects suite “Enchant”, earlier introduced as sister library to jQuery UI, is now a part of jQuery UI. With the 1.5b4 release, you’ll see a bunch of new files in the project’s folder!

The jQuery UI effects can be used standalone or together with UI and have a separate core, which extend the jQuery core to introduce easing, class transitions (morphing) and color animations. All further effects are tighly integrated into the main API and can be used as standalone ( $(..).effect() ) or directly from within jQuery methods you already know ( hide()/show() ).

There’s no documentation for the rich effect API at this point, but we’ll make sure it’s released before the final release of jQuery UI 1.5. In the meantime, feel free to start digging through the code – and watch more more blog posts discussing the new effects!

Overall, we have more than 15 ready-to-use effects for you to use in your projects, not only including everything you know from script.aculo.us (blind,bounce,drop,fold,slide …), but also fresh new effects (transfer, explode. clip, scale) for you to enjoy!

jQuery UI has a new home

UI Website

I’m absolutely thrilled to announce that jQuery UI has finally found a new home at http://ui.jquery.com, along with brand new content, a new combined logo and a complete new design. After many weeks of iterations, we finally found the time to concentrate a bit on the website.

The new site features a complete new download builder already including effects, a real-world demo carousel, and a functional demo suite that makes it easy to see and try out UI examples and their syntax. Also planned for the next weeks is a theme section with directions on downloading UI themes and how to make them, and a tutorials section that will feature easy tutorials to easily learn controlling UI widgets.

A big thanks and kudos goes to Liferay’s Art Director Brian Miller, who did a great job and invested countless hours to achieve this beautiful design!

See you soon!

Paul Bakaus and the jQuery UI Team

29 thoughts on “jQuery UI 1.5b4, featuring effects and a new home

  1. jive on said:

    guys, hats off to you. And just when I was beginning to get worried. I am following you both on twitter, (jive), so I guess next time I won’t get so impatient! Great job.

    This is very exciting!

  2. Pingback: jQuery UI now with Enchant as Effect-engine - The Frontend

  3. Seems like the new release has completely broken draggable+resizable now. I would post a bug report but the jQuery Trac isn’t working either: IntegrityError: (1062, “Duplicate entry ‘bf4f39c0467ab22-0-0’ for key 1”)

    Sigh.

  4. neojp on said:

    Neat, the website is realeased at last :)
    We still need to do some fixes, yet is as cool as the UI team ;)

    Congratulations for the release, have fun coding guys!

  5. Pingback: Bram.us » jQuery UI 1.5b4 released, with integrated jQuery Enchant!

  6. Nice new look, but finding demos and a good list of what jQuery UI provides is still pretty painful. That slider for the demos is probably not the best format for viewing demos imo. I still can’t find a listing of the effects provided in jQuery UI, which is a big reason I would want to use it, as I’m sure many others would too. Not to get down on anyone, the library is nice, but the public facing website describing it isn’t very helpful. Its hard to find time for that kind of stuff I know, but I was hoping after reading this post that some of those would have been addressed.

  7. I simply love this library. I will wait for the final release and just hope that it will not cause big problems with some very nice jQuery plugins out there

  8. Not all demos un UI site work in IE6. Particularly the resizable image demo kills explorer 6 (try it and see: an endless loop of error messages)

  9. Pingback: jQuery UI 1.5b4, featuring effects and a new home « outaTiME

  10. Tack on said:

    I love it when people build websites that don’t scale properly when fonts are zoomed.

    Otherwise looks nice.

  11. Timothy Farrar on said:

    Hey guys,
    Great release… congrats… one thing though… the tabs example sends you back to the base of the functional demo’s section every time you click on one (after it selects / disables / inserts / or adds a tab)… thought you might want to fix this one :)

  12. Ricardo on said:

    Draggable elements with helpers are not rendering correctly on Safari for Windows (the clone appears under the original element, away from the cursor).

  13. Site looks good, but there is some inline styling and JavaScript in the HTML of the page (just semantics). Maybe demos should use non-Apple images and product names?

  14. Marc Diethelm on said:

    Huh!? I’m seeing
    Error: missing } after property list
    using jquery-1.2.4b.packed.js
    The other versions (min, full) work fine. Strange that no one has commented on this earlier…

    You may want to bump up to b5 :)

    Anyway, I appreciate your recent decisions (integrating effects, dimensions), that’s great. Can’t wait for the effects documentation. ;)

  15. xwisdom on said:

    Hi Ricardo,

    I’m getting the same error with IE and firefox on windows:

    “Draggable elements with helpers are not rendering correctly on Safari for Windows (the clone appears under the original element, away from the cursor).”

  16. MarcusT on said:

    Looking forward to 1.5, but a few comments:

    1) I find it very odd that the carousel on http://ui.jquery.com/demos has arrows which move the items in the opposite direction indicated… this is a rather basic usability issue, but fortunately easily resolved – simply put the right arrow on the right, and the left on the left!

    2) The carousel should include a title beneath (or superimposed on top of) each thumbnail to indicate what the demo is for, at present it’s not clear until you click, and even then not always so (see next)

    3) I suggest that the left hand column on http://ui.jquery.com/repository/real-world/splitpane/ should not contain the items that they do, since it suggests to the user that clicking them will load functional demos of those jQuery UI features, but in fact nothing happens at all! I thought for a few minutes this was a completely broken jQuery UI feature browser until I realised that the only feature being demo’d was the split panes, which isn’t entirely obvious – though the title & heading does suggest this is the page’s purpose, the items in the left column serve to confuse… I suggest instead “item 1”, “item 2”, etc.