Spice Up Your UI

Spice Up Your UI: "Spice Up Your UI

DirectX Transitions and Filters Can Make Your Web Pages More Compelling



By Andrew Flick and Devin Rader



As we enter the dawn of a new era, two new up-and-coming UI superheroes are here to make their debut. Who are we, you may ask? We are Flick and Rader: Partners in UI; but we are more commonly known to the outside world as Andrew Flick and Devin Rader, Technology Evangelists for Infragistics.



Whether we have superhuman powers is questionable — but you won’t be seeing us scale any tall buildings in a city near you. And as the superheroes for a new generation, we are leaving the fight between good and evil to our predecessors, so that we may be able to focus on the daunting task of “saving the world” one tip and trick at a time!



In the coming months, we’ll introduce you to a range of tips and tricks, from transitions and filters and going 508 Compliant to how a server-side developer should interact with a UI developer. All of our tips will enable you to create awesome user-interfaces in look, style, and performance.



Introduction

Internet Explorer contains many little-known and hidden features that, given the right circumstances, you can use to your advantage when developing Web sites. Because many of these features are specific to Internet Explorer, and are not available on any other browser, you should probably only consider using them when you are developing in an environment like a corporate intranet or some other controlled environment where you can guarantee that everyone who uses the site will be using Internet Explorer. Given that caveat, there is really no reason why you cannot take advantage of these powerful features.



In this installment of “UI Tips” we are looking at transitions and filters. Transitions and filters are UI capabilities that have been present in IE since version 4, but were greatly enhanced with version 5.5 and now include a variety of visual effects, which we’ll review and demonstrate here"

Check out the site mentioned regularly for some tips and tricks in web designing...