If you haven't already, check out the new .Mac Web Gallery for some interesting use of javascript. Here is a sample gallery - once it finished loading you can hover over the albums to quickly scan whats inside.

Grid, Mosaic, Carousel and Slideshow modes are available for viewing individual albums. Mosaic looks great on wide screen displays, and makes perfect sense since most of the new Macs have one of those. Reducing clutter also helps - no ads, comments, ratings, tags and "related photos" of people you don't care about. 

It's also about using the effective use of available space. Compare with Flickr album view of same screen size and resolution and see how much space the later wastes by using the fixed width layout optimized to work on most screen sizes. Dot Mac gallery, on the other hand, uses a smart javascript driven fluid layout - when browser window is resized main image is scaled in steps, preserving the aspect ratio.

.Mac gallery is not yet bug free, certainly feels heavy while it loads and with all javascript goodness I don't understand why it doesn't preload next image in individual / slideshow modes. However it is definitely more inspiring than yet-another-ajax-grid. I'm sure it gets dissected on patterns and controls soon enough.

via Ajaxian.