There’s been some talk about Zoomii in the couple weeks since it launched. It’s definitely a cool idea. Also noteworthy is the fact the site’s creator is from right here in town.
There was a lengthy thread on the ngc mailing list about it the week I was on vacation which I have not read yet. I guess library folks are pretty excited about the possibility of a Zoomii interface in their opacs.
Not meaning to be a wet blanket but the very thing that makes Zoomii possible is the very thing pretty much all ILSes lack: an API. Therefore, at this point, getting such an interface in your average opac is going to be pretty much like pulling teeth.
Of course, that’s not stopping some people. Dave Pattern (IMHO, the closest thing libraryland has to a genius) has whipped up a virtual shelf browser in his HIP opac. For neither the first nor probably the last time, Dave’s “crappy prototype” has inspired me to essay something similar.
Not surprisingly, the app I’m currently working on will build on my work on the book cover browser and utilize the Yahoo! carousel component. I made some good progress in a few hours on Friday so hopefully will have my own crappy prototype to share shortly! 
Hey Mike — great minds think alike!
I spent the weekend looking at various carousel widgets and ended up mostly playing around with the Yahoo one.
flashcomponents.net has a few interesting ones, but sadly no feebies.
If I get some spare time today, I’m going to have a play with http://www.flshow.net/
That flash carousel is pretty slick looking. I’m always a little concerned about using flash for accessibility reasons but it’s quite possible the Yahoo! component is just as bad.
it’s definitely “eye candy”…
http://webcat.hud.ac.uk/test2/carousel/booktest.html
Yes, it’s very nice! I can’t quite picture it on an opac page though!
Incidentally, I could not get it to work in firefox, only in IE…
Mozilla based browsers require the use of the EMBED tag over OBJECT. See YouTube’s example code for an example.
It’s nice to know that library folk find this useful, but the real question is whether or not library patrons could find this useful (again, so long as it can be integrated into our PAC). I’d imagine the Open-ILS/Evergreen people are enjoying all this open development.
Duh, re: embed vs. object. I didn’t even look at the source code.
I keep thinking for some reason that it’s no longer 1998 and we have moved on from that stupid tag duplication…
If I remember correctly, I think there is a way to allow both browsers to work off the same tag. I can’t recall which to use or how it’s possible…or which browser versions are supported. Last time I used Flash, I used SWFObject JS to embed it, so the script took care of the hard work for me.