Kendo UI for jQuery (R3 2016) ​

In the latest release of Kendo UI for jQuery, we unveil new Dialog and Media Player widgets, plus lots of new features for Spreadsheets and more.

On September 14th we released Kendo UI for jQuery 2016.3.914. This is the same Kendo UI suite you know and love. We just renamed it in order to avoid confusion with the newly published Kendo UI for Angular 2. The release is densely packed with feature improvements and bug fixes. We also squeezed in two new widgets—the Dialog and the Media Player. Here are all the details from this exciting release.

DropDowns and Numerics—a Round of Feature Improvements

Our usage statistics suggest that the Kendo UI form widgets are the most used ones; at times even surpassing the grid. With that in mind, we took a long hard look at what could be polished and improved—no stone was left unturned. No feature request was left unread. The result: an epic compilation of 26 features and bugs. The engineer's closing comment is extremely modest, given the complexity some of these involved. Each of the items is worth checking out if you use the widgets, but if you don't have the time, go straight to the ComboBox custom templates/add new item demos.

Upload—Custom Drop Zone

Dropping files for upload from the file explorer to the browser window was a huge usability improvement for the web in general. The custom dropzone feature of the Upload allows you to take full advantage of that. Since we re-opened the Upload, we also decided to address several usability problems and missing API features—check out this GitHub issue for more details.

A New Dialog

The dialog widget addition to Kendo UI was long overdue, and we attribute this to the existing Window being very similar. Not anymore! The Dialog is here, packed with features and different modes. Make sure that you check out the treeview/treelist picker demos. With these, we provided an alternative implementation for the most requested feedback portal items (Treeview and Grid in combobox). While not exactly what was asked for, we consider the dialog based implementation more suitable for UI that has to work on mobile devices—a requirement that becomes more and more common every day.

A New Media Player

Video seems to be everywhere now. I miss the times when Googling "how to …" yielded results other than unnecessarily long video clips in YouTube. That's just me, though. I am sure that many of you deal with multimedia content in your Kendo UI projects; why leave you stranded without a media player? We carefully analyzed the feature set of the media player control from the sister ASP.NET AJAX suite, and ported the parts we like to the Kendo UI Media Player. My favorite demo is the ListView as a playlist.

Spreadsheet Custom Editors

The custom editors feature was the most voted Spreadsheet one in our feedback portal. Rightfully so—the spreadsheet widget really shines in advanced data entry scenarios, and the custom editors enhance that a lot. Check out how the custom editors work in this demo and follow the instructions from our documentation to enable them in your project.

How about [ Fill In The Blank ]? Did it make it in the release?

It may have—we addressed more than a hundred bugs and features in this milestone. Browse and search in the R3 2016 GitHub milestone. There is a good chance that we got to it. If not, then go ahead and submit your request in the UserVoice portal—we actively monitor and pick popular requests from there.

Roadmap, Webinar and What's Next

In the next couple of weeks, we are going to announce the roadmap of our next release—R1 2017. Stay tuned!

And don't forget to register for our release webinar, where you'll find out about all the latest upgrades we've made to Kendo UI, including more info about the new Kendo UI for Angular beta.