Flower 1.0 release!

I’m thrilled to announce the 1.0 release of our Flower JavaScript library. To steal the headline from the Flower page, Flower is a JavaScript library designed to give musicians easy access to UI tools like image/video lightboxes and sound players. In a nutshell: it let’s you do fancy things without being a fancy programmer (though if you are one it’s easy to build upon and customize, so please have at it!)

We designed Flower with ease-of-use in mind, so it installs with just three lines of JavaScript added to a page, or for WordPress users installation of a plugin. To use the various bits of functionality you just need to add CSS classes to links and divs, and everything is styled through standard CSS. This lets all your media links continue to work, albeit less fancily, even when JavaScript has been turned off.

So now you can easily do things like:

have fancy video overlays,

show images in fancy lightbox galleries,

and make fancy sound players like the one below.

 
This is a 1.0 release and as such we’d love to hear as much feedback as possible and see how folks are using it. We’re polishing a few advanced demos that show things like SoundCloud support for the Soundplayer and a neat video playlist feature. On the immediate horizon is intelligent HTML5 support (Flash fallback, special interfaces for small form-factors) and more social and online media support.

Please enjoy, and leave a comment if you wind up using it!

Here’s the official Flower page and you can dive into more thorough documentation on our github account page.

 
Thanks: I’d be a huge jerk if I didn’t thank github for sponsoring out account, ENTP for sponsoring our Lighthouse account, MooTools for making an amazing library that this is built upon, and Scott Schiller for writing SoundManager 2 which we started using to power audio in the 1.0 release and beyond.