With YUI 2.8.0, YUI 3.0.0, and PHP Loader 1.0.0 beta 1 out the door, the team here is focused on our final big objective for the year: YUICONF2009. Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford will be keynoting next week at our first public, YUI-focused conference. In addition to the YUI engineers presenting sessions, we're looking forward to hearing from community members like Matt Snider and Eric Ferraiuolo. While the conference is sold out, YUI Theater will be there capturing as much as it can — so stay tuned here for video coverage as it becomes available.

Here are a few of the other YUI-related news items we've tracked in the past few weeks. If you have an item we missed, or something you'd like to see covered in the next update, please leave a note in the comments; for all the latest YUI news as it happens, follow yuilibrary on Twitter.

• YUI2GO -- IPhone/Android App for YUI API Docs: YUI contributor and fellow Yahoo! Chad Auld has been working on side project with his partner at Brilaps, Ozgur Cem Sen.  Called YUI2GO, this app uses Titanium to put a handheld-friendly UI on top of the YUI API documentation for YUI 2 and YUI 3.  The application will cost you $0.99 in the iTunes App Store or the Android Marketplace.
  

• YUI Carousel, Split Buttons and More on Rivendell Bicycle Works' Site: What could be better than a custom bike-works website making use of YUI?  Rivendell is a manufacturer of beautiful, old-school lugged steel bike frames, and their site is replete with old-school charm.  You'll find buttons, menus, carousels and more from YUI throughout the site -- as well as some seriously attractive bikes.  One Bombadil for me, please. (Original source.)
  

• Matt Snider's AjaxObject Part II (built with YUI Connection Manager): YUI contributor and Mint.com engineer Matt Snider continues his work building an XHR layer on top of YUI 2's Connection Manager.
  

• Ajaxian Comparo: YUI Compressor and MS Ajax Minifier: Ajaxian has posted an interesting deep dive into the differences between YUI Compressor and the new Microsoft Ajax Minifier. 
  

• YUI on Egoagosys (screenast in Italian): This looks to be a lovely implementation of YUI DataTable, Buttons, Menus and much more, all narrated in Italian for your viewing pleasure.

  (Original source.)

• Yahoo!'s Ian Pouncey on Accessible Tabs with YUI3: Yahoo! home page engineer Ian Pouncey has a post up on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog about the work the home page and YUI teams did to bake in accessibility with YUI 3.

• Jeffrey Cobb, "Simple YUI Login Using Ajax, Cookies and Server Side Auth": Jeffrey Cobb is back on yuicoder.com with a new code sample.  This one generates a simple login screen using YUI Container, Animation, Cookie, and Button.  Check out the JS and Perl code snippets on Jeffrey's post.

• Simple YUI 2-based Table Striper: User falcor on the YUI Forums posted his simple table striper.  Writes falcor: "Just name make your table id #products and you're good to go. The CSS rules are in the