Twitter does some great stuff with javascript. What I really appreciate about what they do is that there aren’t any epic JS functionalities — they’re all simple touches. One of those simple touches is the “Login” dropdown on their homepage. I’ve taken some time to duplicate that functionality with MooTools.

One thing I love doing is duplicating OS functionalities. One of the things your OS allows you to do easily is move from one item to another. Most of the time you’re simply trying to get to the next or the previous item. MooTools NextPrev is a compact javascript class that allows you to move about a collection of items quickly using human terms.

I wanted to bring attention to an outstanding presentation given by MooTools Core Developer Christoph Pojer.  Given at FOSDEM 2010, Christoph provides an overview of what MooTools is, who should use it, how it should be used.  Examples are given throughout the presentation. 

I highly recommend MooTools users of all experience levels watch this video, as well as jQuery or Dojo users looking to simply understand what this framework is about.

News scroller have been around forever on the internet. Why? Because they’re usually classy and effective. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be taking a simple scroller and making it into a flexible, portable class. We have to crawl before we walk though; let’s make a simple news scroller using MooTools.

The HTML

<div id="news-feed">
	<ul>
		<li><strong style="font-size:14px;">News Item 1</strong><br />Pellentesque habitant morbi...<a href="#">Read More</a></li>
		<li><strong style="font-size:14px;">News Item 2</strong><br />Pellentesque habitant morbi...<a href="/news/2">Read More</a></li>
		<!-- more.... -->
	</ul>
</div>

The HTML part is fairly simple: a list with numerous list items (news items) wrapped in a single DIV.

My “Create a Simple Slideshow Using MooTools” series has been hugely successful. The first step was laying the groundwork for the slideshow, the second step was adding controls and events to the slideshow, and the third step was recoding the slideshow into a sexy class. This fourth slideshow tutorial will add thumbnail previews and captions to the slideshow.

No Class? WTF!?

I’ve chosen to revert back to the “inline” code from the second tutorial. Why? I’m going a little bit off of the reservation with this one. I think classes are important to use when you want a more generic slideshow; this one will be a bit more customized. That isn’t to say, however, that I wont be creating another class in the future.