North Knight Software

As part of a project that we were working on, we decided that we needed some sort of 'popup' functionality that would grab information off the server and show it off without reloading the whole page. Lightbox is a very popular (and ubiquitous) image gallery library that did something like we were looking at.

Gavin found a library called Slimbox, a light-weight Lightbox clone based on the MooTools framework (which he had found a few weeks previous and we both thought was pretty neat). It's a great little image gallery, and a good step in the right direction, but it wasn't a complete solution.

MooTools has an HTTP request object within its framework, in addition to a suite of fantastic CSS animation and tweening tools, so I figured it wouldn't be too hard to make it work with that instead of just grabbing images. It wasn't! Aside from a few hitches with obscure edge cases it went quite smoothly. Another big hitch was that a version 1.2 of MooTools came out while I was working on it, and I decided to jump ships to the version. It was a bit wonky (the API has changed in a number of ways) but it's worth it; MooTools is a great library to work with and 1.2 brings in a lot of nice features and seems to tighten up the API quite well.

So was born SlimPage. It's a nifty little library that allows you to load any page from your webserver into a small pop up. It will also allow any of the links in that popup to open in the same popup, and keep a history of what you've visited so you can go back. Take a look on the SlimPage information page. There is a link there to a live version that demonstrates its capabilities.

If you end up using SlimPage for anything (which you're more than free to do — it's under the MIT license) we'd love to hear about it.