Slimbox, the ultimate lightweight Lightbox clone is a clone of lightbox which replaces “click to view” image links. There are some good things and bad things about it. First, it looks much more elegant than typical “click to view” solutions that either pop-up a window (bad) or take you to an empty page with just an image in it. It also gives you the ability to cycle through images with next/prev buttons and the ability to include a caption.

However, the problems are:

• Breaks the back button
• Images may be too big to fit on the screen
• Next/Prev buttons are obscured until you move your mouse over the correct portion of the image
• You can sometimes feel trapped, as if the lightbox has taken over your browser window
• It would be nice to show non-image/non plain text content

The cool thing is, these complaints are all very minor and are easily overcome. The author strove to recreate the script.acul.us based lightbox as much as possible, so some of these problems were carried over from the port to mootools.

Other cool js in the news? Mootools is now my *favorite* js library. The compressed script with all the bells and whistles is only 35k. I’ll write more about it later. Also based on mootools is Transcorners, a 4k library for rounding corners, which is great for CMS systems where your users may not have the technical ability to add rounded corner elegance to a page. Also, Snipshot, an ajax based image editor. Basic, but good and easy.