Apex 3.0 new page item types

I just found out that in Apex 3.0 there are 4 new interesting page item types that i completely overlooked for some unknown reason.

One of these page item types, the so-called HTML editor (standard) has been promptly adopted because it can quickly make more appealing the global notification messages that i deliver with the application i announced in a previous posting.

I'll not spend further time to describe the new HTML editor item types, a replacement for the existing Textarea with HTML editor, because Patrick Wolf posted an interesting article where he refers of a trick provided by Carsten Czarski for including images.

Another new entry is the pop-up color picker, a handy widget that allows you choose a color by selecting the desired hue from a pop up window and returning the equivalent hexadecimal code. This is especially useful when one wants to let the user customize the look of certain page elements interactively. Before the introduction of this tool, i used a similar concept for creating the colored radio buttons that you can see in the Yocoya Regular Expression Workbench.
This kind of page element was simply obtained by using a LOV, either static or dynamic where each element is made up of a return value consisting in the hex color code and a description containing the required html fragments. With the introduction of the pop-up color picker there is finally a built-in element that comes to the rescue.

Then there is a date picker with a user defined item format mask.
Until now i never had a need for a non-standard format mask, so i don't expect to use this kind of elements any time soon, but you can see it at work in the page linked below.

Finally, there is a most interesting item type, something that has been used quite a lot of times in certain pages of Apex itself since the beginning, but that was not available as a generic item
type for the normal developer: the shuttle.

You can see all these item types together in a simple live demo page.