It looks like flowplayer built custom animations for themselves and decided to release it as a library. Good publicity and a well designed website.

I think the library itself has great video support but not much else.

Do they list any advantage for using Flashembed over SWFObject?

http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/

Wish our team had found this a month ago, we just finished building half of these things.

Its good to see some more options but it still does not compare to jQuery UI with its unified styling and theme roller.

I like having jQuery UI components standalone and using them as needed, relying on compression and merging tools like yui compressor to do their job.

Being a smaller core set of components is not really a big benifit.

They have a good point about the api improvements over jQuery UI but i can't see it being enough to switch.

So, this is different from jQuery UI?

Yes; it looks like it's more focused on a lightweight set of core features (obviously opinions as to what constitutes "core" features may vary).

It actually seems more reminiscent of early mootools.

Different,yes, but not necessarily in a way that matters to me.

They specifically refer to the basic JQuery UI elements when they state, under "Essential tools for modern websites"

<blockquote> Let's face it: do you really need drag-and-drop, resizables, selectables or sortable tables in your web applications? Websites are not desktop applications. They are different.

What you really need are tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, smooth navigation, great visual effects and all those "web 2.0" goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites.

This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today's website. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, configured and styled. In the end, you can have hundreds of different widgets and new personal ways of using the library. </blockquote>

This looks like repackaging the more popular stand-alone jQuery plugins/widgets into a single bundle/distribution, with nice docs and demos, very different from jQuery UI which is more like half a framework and some widgets.

And I have to say that I agree with them. Whenever I am confronted with, say, a "window" in a web app (i.e. a popup that I can move around in the browser), it just feels weird.

Some of the tools look like great implementations, but if I ever saw a website use the "expose" tool (http://flowplayer.org/tools/demos/expose/index.html), I'd be pissed. It doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose, except perhaps for a first-use help screen, and even then, it's disconcerting.

It's useful for videos to minimize page clutter when you're not watching full screen. Hulu does a similar effect when you hit "Lower Lights" next to a playing video.

Youtube does this now too.

It's a great feature when you're watching a 30 minute video.

I dunno, combine it with a little animation on the element and you got yourself a nice little lightbox.

...that doesn't behave like any other lightbox anywhere. This Expose tool is just flat-out bad UI; it emphasizes something, makes the user guess how to deemphasize it, and isn't visibly for anything.

It's just a "brick" for building your own things. Here: http://flowplayer.org/tools/demos/overlay/expose.html

has anyone found a way to get non-minified js version of this library? to me this library is as good as closed-source

awesome, it's so put-together, i'll definitively use it. together with the jquery ui library.