Given that screen estate is always limited, “lightbox” viewer applications are a very economic way to show image galleries, flash movies, and the like. I believe I’ve tried all the better viewers (named GreyBox, Slimbox, Thickbox, iBox…), and ended up using Shadowbox. Unlike some others, this one is very flexible, and the code is clean and fully standards compliant – heureka! Still, I am not sure yet if I find “popup” boxes in general, and those that come in the disguise of a “lightbox” in particular, too gadgety to show my work. I did my best to make the presentation less distracting, which is one of the reasons why I now use white throughout my site. Examples for how I used the viewer are here (image galleries) and here (flash movies).
If I don’t like the result in a couple of weeks, I’ll write new code from the ground up for my entire site, only using html, php, and css. After years of Flash and JavaScript, that should feel like a cleansing ritual!
(P.S.: These foreign traffic cones from yesterday – no Photoshop, they looked exactly like this.)