Blog » jQuery UI 1.6rc4: It’s getting really close
Posted December 31st, 2008 by PaulAttention: We found a regression in the rc3 release that breaks datepicker in Internet Explorer. The issue has now been resolved with the rc4 release - please do not download the rc3 release anymore. We apologize for the inconvenience.
I’m absolutely thrilled to announce the latest release candidate for the long awaited jQuery UI version 1.6. It has been a busy couple of months, and not only our team but also our processes, specifications, and codebase has been updated. This means that rc4 isn’t simply a bugfix release on top of rc2, but really a whole different level of code. Using a our new interaction design processes, we build up the foundation of many widgets from the ground up, and refactored widgets multiple times until we finally reached the look and feel we were confident with. So, let me show you quickly what has changed especially in this release!
Datepicker and slider refresh
In order to make room for the new theming, we needed to unclutter the datepicker a bit. A couple of options have been removed, changeMonth and changeYear have been changed to be disabled by default and showButtonPanel was introduced as new method. More on that soon, detailed information can also be found in the related ticket.
The slider also went through a refactor. The ‘axis’ option was changed to ‘orientation’, the ‘handle’ and ‘handles’ options were removed, ’steps’ and ’stepping’ were removed in favor of ’step’, ’startValue’ and ‘moveTo’ have been removed in favor of ‘value’ (option and method), and much more. For more detail, see the slider specification page.
We will provide detailed compatibility information and upgrade solutions with the final release, so stay tuned.
Drag & Drop logic overhaul
The positioning and intersection logic of drag and drop and sortables has been completely redone, along with more than 200 automated tests to test all different environments, i.e. scroll offsets and position values. As positive effect, at least 30 conditions where the positioning was failing (i.e. scroll not included, helper stick at top) had been fixed.
New widget designs
jQuery UI 1.6rc4 features an entirely new look and feel, designed by our new Interaction Design team and powered by the new jQuery UI CSS Framework. Each widget’s markup and CSS has been re-approached to provide our cleanest and most flexible solution yet.
CSS Framework
jQuery UI 1.6rc4 is built upon a brand new powerful CSS framework. The new jQuery UI CSS framework is built to support not only jQuery UI’s own plugins, but also custom plugin development. It is a special kind of CSS framework that is aimed specifically at user interface development as opposed to overall page layout. The framework provides classes for commonly used UI utilities, states, containers and icons and is manipulated by jQuery UI ThemeRoller. Read more about the
framework API here: http://jqueryui.pbwiki.com/jQuery-UI-CSS-Framework
Refreshed demos
The website is currently going through some major updates, and in the first block of changes we’re happy to announce that the demos section has been completely redone from scratch. We removed the demo carousel (which was nice but not really usable), and introduced a page that both includes real world and functional demos for all widgets and interactions. The demos are directly pulled from the actual demos/ directory in our code repository, and then ajaxified. They are bookmarkable, and if you download the development bundle, you’ll see they even come as standalone!
This is only the first step of where we want to go for the final 1.6 release. If you’re interested in how it might look in the end, have a peek at our design wiki!
Themeroller v2!
ThemeRoller has been completely redesigned to compliment the new CSS framework and widget designs. ThemeRoller now resides in a vertical sidebar and has loads of new features added, such as:
Toggle-able panels with previews
ThemeRoller’s levers are now grouped into collapsible panes for ease of use. Each pane shows a preview of that state’s current styles so you can still view its settings while collapsed.
New Levers! Round corners! Drop shadows!
We’ve added new levers to the application for highlight, error, corner radius, overlays, and overlay shadows. Try em out!
Icon sprites
The jQuery UI CSS Framework comes with loads of icons for custom widget development. Icons are now packed into sprites and classes for each icon can be found in the docs.
New themes
We’ve added a bunch of cool new themes to the new gallery which can beviewed and customized in the gallery tab of ThemeRoller.
History/back button support
Every action you take in TR is now undoable/redoable through your browser’s history.
Legacy theme support
Themes designed using the older version of ThemeRoller will load just fine in ThemeRoller v2, but keep in mind that there are a number of new settings that your old theme will not have yet. This version of ThemeRoller allows you to still download any ThemeRoller theme for jQuery UI 1.5.
Coming soon…
- PNG 8 Support in ThemeRoller
- New ThemeRoller developer tool: Pull ThemeRoller into any page on the web and design themes for custom components built using the jQuery UI CSS Framework.
- New ThemeSwitcher bookmarklet: A quick script that will allow you to bring a miniaturized Theme Gallery into your web pages to allow visitors to quickly change themes for custom components built using the jQuery UI CSS Framework.
Download and test!
Now go ahead and download from our download page, then help us test and report anything odd that looks like a bug in our bugtracker. Also note: jQuery UI 1.6 final will ship with and require jQuery 1.3, so please let us know if you find any issues when combining this release with jQuery 1.3b1.
Cheers!
January 1st, 2009 at 1:19 am
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January 1st, 2009 at 1:34 am
wo wo! good happy new year present!
January 1st, 2009 at 5:31 am
Awesome changes! Happy new year!
January 1st, 2009 at 6:10 am
Another congrats to the jQueryUI team for another great release. The new themeroller looks great and I can’t wait to try out the new code alongside 1.3 beta!
January 1st, 2009 at 11:06 am
Great work guys, tons tons better and themeroller with spriting is awesome.
Thanks
January 1st, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Great! Thank’s for all the work and a happy new year to everyone!
January 1st, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Excellent! Looking forward to the new release!
January 1st, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Great work, and I’m really glad to see the latest release. Not to be the party pooper… but, I wonder how frequent though are you planning to keep changing the API so dramatically? I’ve become slightly disenchanted as of recent because each subsequent release, while fixing bugs, changes so dramatically that updating it on sites that use it are a chore. It would be nice if you would consider usage breaks for those adopters of UI as you move ahead. I think you’ll find better support from the community in adopting UI if you’re more sensitive to this.
January 1st, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Excellent news Paul! Happy new year to all the jQuery UI team!
January 1st, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Why are the tabs still wrong???
There is still a space under the unused tabs instead of just a line. Someone at jquery needs to check out other tab systems and see how they are supposed to look.
January 2nd, 2009 at 12:14 am
好啊好哦，好好测试。
January 2nd, 2009 at 12:38 am
保罗你真可爱！
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:57 am
Glad things are progressing well, 1.6 is looking great.
I have to agree with Stan though - changing the API so dramatically, while maybe necessary, is very hard to keep up with. 1.5 changed it quite a bit, and 1.6 is changing it again. Many of the changes are just cosmetic things, like renaming properties, but these things all cause great pain when trying to upgrade a site/application using UI.
While I use UI at my job, it is mostly from before 1.5, simply because upgrading to 1.5 was so problematic. I’m glad we never upgraded now, because going to 1.6 would have meant we’d have to redo all the work we did. Why should UI care what I use? My primary job is to work on our internal code - but this often means I need to make improvements or fixes to libraries like UI to get my job done. I always contribute these changes back, but unfortunately UI is not interested because my changes are to code that is obsolete.
I’m sure I’m not the only person in this boat. There are probably many potential contributors that simply can’t contribute because they can’t keep going through the hassle of upgrading. It’s unfortunate that I have to call it a ‘hassle’, but unfortunately its the truth.
I also completely understand you can’t build a skyscraper on the foundation of a house - sometimes you have to tear it all down and rebuild a better foundation. It’s hard to find that balance, but hopefully now as we go into the future, we will see a more consistent, and backwards-compatible, API.
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:54 am
Happy new Year.
this is great stuff. JQuery UI is going from strength to strength. I will definitely try it for upcoming web projects.
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:57 am
[…] jQuery UI is coming close to 1.6 and today a new version of the Themeroller application was released. Just before Christmas the first beta of jQuery 1.3 was released for testing. […]
January 2nd, 2009 at 10:14 am
jquery能不能像google.cn和youtube.com那样推出包括简体中文在内的国际版？
January 2nd, 2009 at 11:11 am
[…] “rc4 isn’t simply a bugfix release on top of rc2, but really a whole different level of code. Using a our new interaction design processes, we build up the foundation of many widgets from the ground up, and refactored widgets multiple times until we finally reached the look and feel we were confident with.” - Can’t wait for a full release! Spread the word! […]
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
I found sortable to actually work much worse than 1.6rc2 particularly with nested lists. Basically nested (like a tree structure) sortables no longer work at all after the intersection logic overhaul. I’d submit a bug but trac has a duplicate entry error.
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:39 pm
I’m surprised you didn’t include a (sortable) grid to display data. At the moment, I’m using the JQuery grid plugin (http://trirand.com/jqgrid/jqgrid.html). Are you planning to include it in the Jquery UI core in the future?
January 3rd, 2009 at 1:45 pm
[…] jQuery UI 1.6 is shaping up to be a rock-solid re-factoring of the entire library. With RC4 released just two days ago, the UI team have further cleaned up the API while providing a set of tools that are even more extensible and configurable than they were before. […]
January 5th, 2009 at 5:59 am
great job!
but it’s really need to fix the style in ie6!!!
January 5th, 2009 at 8:09 am
Thank you for all your hard job.
As a web developer, I am using this in nearly every of my project.
^_^
January 5th, 2009 at 8:10 am
I would have to question your development process if you are making sweeping changes between what are supposed to be release candidates.
A release candidate should be stable and ready to ship. Give it a few weeks and see if there are any show stopping bugs, then push it out the door if there are none.
If you feel the need to make sweeping changes to a release candidate, then you should drop back to beta status until it can be proven stable.
On the flip side, I’d like to congratulate you all for the good work done, and keep it coming.
January 5th, 2009 at 11:24 am
@Michael Ward - your point is well taken. There was quite a lot of change between these two RCs. We did consider dropping down to beta status, but put the time needed into ensuring this release was truly RC-ready instead.
As mentioned on http://blog.jquery.com/2008/12/11/whats-up-with-jquery-ui/ our process has been improved and better defined, so you’re seeing some of the effects of that. In the future, changes of this magnitude will happen before any RC. Also, we’re open to feedback on how our process could be even better - http://jqueryui.pbwiki.com/Development-phases
January 5th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
The UI is great. It has saved countless hours.
Two things I’ve noticed so far from upgrading from RC2:
- Draggable’s default “scroll” is enabled now. Why?
- Draggable’s default “opacity” is now set to “1″. Any opacity setting on an element which contains PNGs with Alpha transparency look horrible in IE7. We use them all over the place on our site, and setting the transparency:0 isn’t really feasible at this point, requiring me to change the ui.draggable.js file - something I really want to avoid.
January 5th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
[…] The first great news (and is kinda old, is from the last year ) is about jQuery UI 1.6. We have a new RC4 for testing and reporting bugs with a brand new theme roller. Whats this mean? Well.. Not too much if you are not using jQuery […]
January 5th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
@Neil
- re: draggable’s default “scroll”. We try and make all defaults the most common options, so you only have to specify in less common cases
- re: draggable’s opacity default being 1. The default before was undefined, and we’re ensuring all options have defined defaults. Perhaps null would be a better default?
In either case, please open a ticket in Trac http://ui.jquery.com/bugs/newticket Thanks
January 5th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
@Neil - Also, no need to modify ui.draggable.js if the defaults don’t work for you. Simply extend $.ui.draggable.defaults to override.
January 6th, 2009 at 9:49 am
I’m noticing with RC4, sortable serialize-toArray is still returning empty elements.
Cheers
January 8th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Congrats guys, I’ve been watching you since the beginning, it seems you’ve found “your way”, everything looks really nice and polished now, what you have looks and feels better than extjs, can’t wait for the next releases, I just miss an autocomplete and a datagrid.
Keep up the outstanding work.
January 9th, 2009 at 4:19 am
UI的演示页面又更新了，看来官方动作频繁啊。前几天看见演示页面Datepicker有这么一个演示：有一个输入框，单击输入框弹出日历选择板，选择一个日期如20090101，输入框会出现两个日期格式，如：2009/01/01-2009/01/01，这时候日历并未关闭，再选择一个日期如20090109，这时候日历才关闭，而输入框也变成2009/01/01-2009/01/09。也就是说，一个输入框，两个日期。现在官方演示页面更新了，找不着代码了，不知谁有备份吗？
January 9th, 2009 at 4:48 am
找着了。rangeSelect: true,
January 10th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
[…] http://blog.jquery.com/2008/12/31/jquery-ui-16rc3-its-getting-really-close/ 另外，这里说jQuery UI 1.6rc4发布了（rc3里的datepicker有重大bug）。有关注这方面的同学可以看看，当然，jQuery UI的文档一直是个大问题…… […]
January 11th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
UI演示页面的这个演示，每次更新都无法显示，必须新开窗口才行。
http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demos/draggable/containment.html
January 13th, 2009 at 8:17 am
http://ui.jquery.com/demos
UI演示界面又改版了。没次改版，都有新增功能。
January 13th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
jquery hava a big bug，get browser version is wrong ,
in iE7,jQuery.browser.version is 6
在IE7 里面，得到的版本号居然是6
firefox 3里面 得到的是1.9.0.5 ，明显是错的,在最新的1.3beta里面也没有修正这个问题，用thickbox就出问题了，郁闷
January 13th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
jQuery UI site is down
January 14th, 2009 at 9:13 am
这次UI让我耳目一新. 特别是CSS文档. 可以让自已的插件很好的重用.
thanks a lot!
January 14th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
The new refactored ’slider’ in 1.6rc4, doesn’t recognize the ’slide’ and ‘change’ options if jquery 1.3 is used. Those declarations get ignored. It does work however if jquery 1.2.6 is used instead. what in jquery 1.3 breaks it?
January 15th, 2009 at 1:28 am
ui 1.6 跳票了?
January 15th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Good job ! Nested draggables dont seem to work anymore though…. Maybe same error as Michael’s : http://blog.jquery.com/2008/12/31/jquery-ui-16rc3-its-getting-really-close/#comment-337206
January 16th, 2009 at 1:40 am
I just found out that if you use jQuery 1.3 with jQuery UI 1.6rc4, sortable isn’t working properly as to the changes made to 1.3 in rewiring event handlings. Any thoughts on that?
January 16th, 2009 at 11:44 am
@Court - I think it has to do with the changes 1.3 made to trigger handlers. I just reverted back to 1.2.6 and RC2 yesterday because of this problem.
I agree with the others about process - I was using RC2 on a new, large-scale project and would not expect significant changes to the interface. This project will launch with RC2, and it will end up being a pretty sizable task to upgrade later when the official release comes out. Glad to hear that you guys are addressing this now, and I hope that future releases won’t be quite so scattered.
January 16th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
@Eric
Thanks for your feedback on the defaults back on 1/5. I agree with your answer to “scroll:true” being the default, and am glad to see “null” being used for opacity in 1.6rc5. So far it is working great with jQuery 1.6.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that the droppable’s “scope” property breaks if draggables of that scope do not exist
My fix at the moment is to default to an empty array in several spots within ui.droppable.js:
var m = $.ui.ddmanager.droppables[t.options.scope];
- changed to -
var m = $.ui.ddmanager.droppables[t.options.scope] || [];
January 31st, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Thank you for all your hard job.
February 10th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
[…] jQuery UI 1.6rc3 rc4: It’s getting really close […]
March 6th, 2009 at 7:15 am
[…] There’s a ton of new stuff in 1.7. We’ve fixed hundreds of bugs since 1.5.3 and are introducing many new features, a better core architecture, and major theming improvements. We blogged about it already for the rc’s, but here is quick list of the highlights: […]
March 6th, 2009 at 9:19 am
[…] “Outdated” screenshots can be found here. […]
March 29th, 2009 at 12:42 am
[…] jQuery UI ThemeRoller 2 jQuery UI is coming close to 1.6 and today a new version of the Themeroller application was released. Just before Christmas the first beta of jQuery 1.3 was released for testing. […]
April 12th, 2009 at 5:17 am
[…] jQuery UI 1.6 is shaping up to be a rock-solid re-factoring of the entire library. With RC4 released just two days ago, the UI team have further cleaned up the API while providing a set of tools that are even more extensible and configurable than they were before. […]