The other night my trusty feedreader alerted me to a Nitobi post demonstrating a fisheye menu (think Mac OS X dock) in javascript as a part of their upcoming library. A neat effect, to be sure…and useful as well; menu design is so often reduced to a balancing act between the number of items displayed and the actual visibility of each. I fully expect this type of widget to become much more common on the web as the major js animation toolkits begin to offer it.

Searching for a way to do this with script.aculo.us or moo.fx yielded no result, but I did come across another interesting (slightly lesser-known) toolkit - Dojo. I played with it for a few hours and loved it’s functionality, but decided to abandon it for philosophical reasons. I may see about implementing the fisheye widget in script.aculo.us if I ever have time…sooner or later someone has got to.

The above example pulls images from the Flickr API based on the tag you search for, sorted by interestingness. If you want to play around with the code on your own server, you need Dojo and phpFlickr in the same directory as the script. You can get a Flickr API key here. Enjoy!