I think the thing I enjoy most about computers is learning new things; finding new, better and/or more efficient ways of performing a task.  In order to do this, I will often look for new ideas to implement when beginning even a boring mundane project to make it more challenging and to ensure I come out of the other end having learnt something new.

With one (Of the many) projects I'm working on at the moment I've decided to use it as a chance to learn the jQuery JavaScript library, which seems pretty neat so far.  One of the dependancies of this project is sifnt Modal which of course was written with the Prototype library in mind, so a port of that was needed before I could even start!

Well...it really has been a long time since my last blog entry.  Actually if anything this is my first real blog entry...

I'm a bit of an amatuer web 'coder' and generally, in the interests of learning as much as possible, try to code my own solutions for things rather than use someone elses.

I decided my far-from-finished BillShare Clone project needed a nice pretty modal-style popup box, and although I have written a similar thing before I wasn't entirely happy with it so decided to give someone else's a go.  I came across ModalBox, and it seemed to tick all the boxes - pretty, easy to use, lightweight; I started using it.

Although it worked very well, it failed at one crucial feature, the ability to have a modal appear on top of another Modal.  Frustrated, but inspired by it's design, I 'borrowed' some of it's elements (And all of it's CSS) and wrote my own from scratch.

sifnt Modal

Features:

• AJAH (Asyncronous Javascript And HTML) or 'Offline' filled Modals
• Multi-level Modal support
• Tested in Firefox 2-3.1, Safari 3 and Internet Explorer 7

Links:

• Download (Snapshot of Subversion Revision 66)
  
• Subversion Repository (Recommended)
• Demo Page