As you know, a user created a cut down version of HighSlide which we are free to use and would also be free for our users to use commercially without a fee. My main concerns about this are that (a) we need to prove that it does do what we want in all circumstances and (b) we need to question whether we can truly rely on the user to keep it up to date, fix bugs and adapt to new, future requirements.

So I have been looking into alternatives. Oddly, the second best I have seen of this type has more or less the same commercial restriction as HighSlide so can be discounted. Most of the others I have researched – and there are many – simply do not match HighSlide for either their range of use or their visual quality. Plus we have the same issue of ongoing support.

One option that we know will be rugged, kept up to date and may just do what we need – although this needs proving – is the simple jQuery UI Dialog. it IS very simplistic and I need to prove that it will work with our ahah usage but I would feel very comfortable using one of the UI components. The ones we use now (accordion, progress bar, autocomplete, sortable, draggable etc) have proven very rugged and I have been following the development of the jQuery UI components closely and there are many good things in the pipeline, including a perhaps more rugged checkbox/radio button replacement.

So I plan to give the UI dialog a go as my net task towards 5.0…