A few days late, sure...
Once again, I pity the fool who looks at my notes expecting them to be coherent. They make sense to me, and that's why I took the notes. Here's the highlights:
Andrew Wooldridge - YUI Hidden Gems
I didn't expect to take many notes here, since I'd taken my fair share of dives into the YUI source code (I generally no longer care to read the online docs), but Andrew pointed out a few things I had glanced over and missed the value of. Among them, he mentioned:
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Y.Frame - this is a wrapper for using the IFRAME element. It creates a YUI instance inside the IFRAME, so there's sandboxing, etc. but without the complications that come from IFRAME communication. There are quite a few places that we could use this in Ubuntu One. In particular, I think we could use it for the multi-file upload that we've been wanting to do for a long time.
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Y.DOM.inViewPortRegion - The previous day, I went looking into the ImageLoader source to see how it worked, since the NFL talk mentioned a WidgetFold that only rendered the widget when it came into the viewport, and I was curious how it did it. Even though I had found this hidden gem the day before, it's worth noting its value in all sorts of cases. What I'd like to do is make a synthetic event for Node such that we can hook eventHandlers into "enterViewPortRegion" and "exitViewPortRegion" or something similar.
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Y.on('hover') - How did I miss this? It's a synthetic event that YUI provides, since mouseOver and mouseOut can be a bit of a fun house of edge cases. Quite useful.
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Y.on('clickoutside') - I use this in my little phazr library to close on Overlay or Dialog. It's fantastic.
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Y.Later - A wrapper for setTimeout and setInterval. I made specific notes to play with this in some of the U1 things that I'm working on right now.
Eric Ferri$something - The App Framework
This talk Melted. My. Brain. A common theme that I heard repeatedly was that people tend to implement things in YUI, and right when they're finished, the YUI team announces the exact same thing in YUI. I did this recently with the App Framework.
The App Framework in YUI 3.4 leaves just a bit to be desired, but Eric's talk made it clear in his talk that all those desires will be available in YUI 3.5 (with a promised pr release in December). Eric had mentioned earlier in the week that he kind of looked at the iOS UI framework API when designing the App Framework, and I can see that connection. It's got a pretty good disconnect between data and presentation, which can often be kind of painful if you don't give it some thought. A nice API like the one the YUI team has designed makes it easy to design things correctly without putting too much thought into it.
One of the things I'm looking forward to the most in YUI 3.5 is the addition of support for Handlebars templating. This templating will be directly connected into Y.View, but won't be compulsory, so you can use any template system you'd like, and aren't forced in to Handlerbars.
As it stands now, YUI 3.4 has some of the App Framework stuff, and in particular, it has Model and ModelList, which have events that can be hooked into. To me, that's the best way to start using the App framework. Create widgets that handle events in your Model and ModelList instances. At the very least, that means that I have a clear upgrade path from my app framework to YUI's (so I don't have to maintain code, I can just file a bug and complain... :)
After all of this, it became clear that I've been neglecting the YUI Gallery, both in contributing to it and using it. I need to remedy that.