The QuickUI Catalog has been updated to version 0.9.3.1. This is a modest update in terms of functionality, but a significant milestone for the catalog — it represents the culmination of an effort to port all the Catalog controls to a combination of CoffeeScript and LESS.

The original QuickUI framework included the use of a local build tool called the QuickUI markup compiler. This compiled a markup format that was essentially HTML plus the use of custom tags. (In this, the format was remarkably similar to the spec’ed format for Web Components.) Because this format never got any traction, it was eventually deprecated, although still used for the vast majority of the Catalog controls. 2013 has begun with a major push to port all these controls to CoffeeScript for content and behavior and LESS for appearance.

Now that that port has been accomplished, it will be easier to move the Catalog forward, including the addition of new controls and some refactoring of existing ones. Along with this port, a handful of other controls were added to the Catalog:

• ToggleButton is a button that can track a selected state. This can be used as is, or as a base class for custom toggle classes.
• Link wraps a standard HTML <a> tag, and can be used as a base class for custom link classes.
• TextBox wraps a standard HTML text input element, and can be used as a base class for custom text box classes.

This minor release is being made now because it contains a fix for the forthcoming release of jQuery 1.9. Changes:

• A new Control member called Control.browser replicates the behavior of the now-deprecated jQuery.browser member. jQuery is quite reasonably trying to encourage people to use feature-detection libraries like Modernizr instead of looking directly at the user agent to determine behavior, and jQuery 0.9 is removing support for jQuery.browser. However, in developing the QuickUI Catalog controls, minor bugs have been found time and again in specific browsers to prevent controls from working correctly. These bugs are the sorts of things that will never be detectable with a feature-detection library, and hence checking the browser’s user agent is the only practical way to ensure cross-browser compatibility.

The corresponding release of QuickUI Catalog 0.9.3 includes some minor enhancements:

• A new TextBoxWithButton control covers the common UI pattern of a text box with an adjacent button (often labeled “Go” or something similar). The existing SearchBox control has been refactored to derive from TextBoxWithButton.
• A new Log control handles the common need to log text output (e.g., from a background process) to the page.