Page Flip Redux

OK, after looking around the WWW for page flip effects, I believe I've accumulated a list of all the possible options. (Famous last words.) Here they are for posterity.

B found the absolute best (but also most complicated) page flip engine. It’s really impressive! If you want to be boggled by cool/complicated ActionScript this is worth a perusal just for that!

Iparigrafika

While the above is free, these folks seem to have extended it and charge $25 for a Flash component version (it’s pretty – and requires much less hand tweaking):

Flipping Book

E pointed out this neat O’Reilly version a few months back:

O'Reilly

MM found a neat example once that must have been generated by a 3D guru. Pretty neat effect! However, not exactly something you can do with code.

3D Template

There’s even a simple DHTML version – it’s not as cool as the Flash examples, but it’s interesting to see all the methods that have evolved for this effect.

DHTML

Adobe Flex 2 Component Explorer

Flex is so cool. Will somebody buy me Flex? This is a great way to explore the components.

Dynamically Creating a Div in Javascript

Hey, it's handy OK?

var newdiv = document.createElement('div');
newdiv.setAttribute('id','DivName');
newdiv.style.width = 300;
newdiv.style.height = 300;
newdiv.style.left = 300;
newdiv.style.top = 300;
newdiv.style.position = "absolute";
newdiv.style.background = "#00C";
newdiv.style.border = "4px solid #000";       
newdiv.innerHTML = 'text';
document.body.appendChild(newdiv);

LOL! Futurist E pointed out this funny bit of irony:

Microsoft Cries Foul At Stolen Interface
Microsoft Expo’s project leader, Garry Wiseman, wrote a blog post earlier today criticizing Sina, one of China ’s largest search engines, saying “Sina.com steals our design and graphics”. More…

There are definitely similarities, although the irony of Microsoft crying foul
over a stolen user interface (Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp.)
will not be lost on some readers.

Light-emitting shirts!

I want one! :)

Google and Yahoo! - Help!

This Pandia article outlines a neat trend with Google, Yahoo and even MSN. Help for Webmasters!

Links:

• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN
• Ask

Skinning GMail

I was just reading about a neat utility someone developed to "re-skin" the GMail interface. More than that, I was especially fascinated/impressed with how he went about figuring out the needed styles by obtaining the source files of the iframes.

I think Google could really benefit by providing an easy way for users to re-skin their various products. Why not let people go wild with themes?

"First, I wanted to get a dump of the HTML that Gmail generates, so that I could get a feel for its structure (remember, Gmail generates nearly all its HTML through Javascript, thus a "View Source" command will not reveal much). The DOM Inspector showed that Gmail relies on a few IFRAMES for its different views. Once I had figured out which IFRAME contained the mailbox view, I exported its generated source to the clipboard using a JavaScript one-liner invoked from the location bar: javascript:window.clipboardData.setData('Text', window.frames[0].frames[3].document.body.innerHTML). This step had to be done in IE; while Mozilla also supports copying to the clipboard, the code to do so is much longer. The extracted source could then be pasted into a file, run through HTML Tidy (for easier reading) and examined."