Lightboxd - A lightbox with direct links

Quicklink for the impatient: try Lightboxd.

I just love the "lightbox" -pattern for displaying images, and I've tried quite a few implementations. However, there is one feature I've been missing from all of them (admittedly, I should perhaps have rtfm more in some instances), and that feature is direct linking.

For instance, I might want to send a link saying "here, this is the image I was talking about", or the newlyweds I photographed might want to send me a link saying "this is the shot we want printed big".

Being lazy, I tried complaining first, but since that did not seem to work very well, I decided to add this functionality to my favourite lightbox implementation, Lightbox2 by Lokesh Dhakar (I just happen to think it has a very good 'feel'. That, and it was easy to modify... Lightview is looking good too, but it's license does not allow any modifications or derivate work.) However, I'm fully expecting all lightboxes to follow suit and add support for direct linking by the end of next week... ;-)

Lightboxd is a slightly modified Lightbox2, with added direct linking support. It uses standard HTML anchors, so it kind of works even if javascript is disabled (the page jumps to the anchor, but does not open the linked image).
A direct link looks like this (try it!): http://www.subdoc.com/marc/code/lightboxd/#img1

It's by no means perfect - but it's a 1.0.

And for the record: I'm totally hoping this will make it into the original 'distribution' some day - the world does not really need one more lightbox -implementation ;-)

Go get Lightboxd »

Slice animation in plain JavaScript, minus data-uri

I made a slightly more dynamic version of Joonas Lehtinen's Slice animation in plain JavaScript.
Joonas' example creates a 3d animation by using data-uris to embed 1px wide image slices in html. It's a fun animation example and an interesting use of data-uris, but data-uris are a bit of a pain to encode (though you could of course automate the process server-side). I wanted to see if I could keep the fun part while making the script a little more dynamic by getting rid of the need to encode data-uris.

The resulting example animates any image, in the browser (no server needed), using plain javascript (only the initialization is changed, the animation code is basically unmodified).

Try it »

I have yet to find a use for this, other than checking how quickly your browser (and computer) slows down when you feed it a bigger image - but I find it interesting nonetheless.