jQuery Techniques for Web Designers
Posted on 07-08-2011 | Posted in jQuery, Web Designing, Web Development
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With several JavaScript frameworks available, jQuery is quickly becoming a favorite. If you are interested in using jQuery for animated effects, here are 13 excellent tutorials to get you on your way.
Building an Animated Cartoon Robot with jQuery
Animate a hover with jQuery
How To Create A ‘Mootools Homepage’ Inspired Navigation Effect Using jQuery
CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time
Build An Incredible Login Form With jQuery
Learning jQuery: Revealing Photo Slider
Learning jQuery: Fading Menu – Replacing Content
Using jQuery for Background Image Animations
Animated Menus Using jQuery
Create a Cool Animated Navigation with CSS and jQuery
Animated Drop Down Menu with jQuery
jQuery Tutorials for Designers
How to Load In and Animate Content with jQuery
To help you take it up a notch, we share below some methods that can help you give visitors to your website an amazing user experience. Here are over 45 impressive jQuery plug-ins and techniques that have been recently created and that could make the development of your next website an easier and more interesting experience than the last.
1. Build A Login Form With jQuery
2. Spoiler Revealer with jQuery
A simple technique that hides some content first and fades it in once a link is clicked.
This AJAX file upload plug-in allows users to easily upload multiple files without having to refresh the page. In addition, you can use any element to trigger the file selection window. The plug-in creates a semi-transparent file input screen over the button you specify, so when a user clicks on the button, the normal file selection window is shown. After the user selects a file, the plug-in submits the form that contains the file input to an iFrame. So it isn’t true AJAX but provides the same user experience.
Give your users fancy Facebook-like dynamic inputs, with auto-complete and pre-added values.
5. Create Accessible Charts Using Canvas and jQuery
This tool is proof that you can use the <canvas> element to illustrate HTML table data. The idea is a good one: putting the data in a table allows it to remain accessible, while the chart can be shown for visual enhancement.
Form Manipulation
6. Radio Button and Check Box Replacement
This jQuery tool replaces radio buttons and check boxes with a more appealing display.
7. Submit a Form without a Page Refresh
Here is a quick and easy way to make a jQuery AJAX contact form with a “honeypot” to foil email bots, load success and error messages dynamically without leaving the page and provide descriptive error messages detailing why submitted values have failed validation.
9. Simple jQuery Form Validation
This jQuery form shows live form-input validators both server-side and browser-side.
Navigation Menus
A context menu plug-in for jQuery that features easy implementation, keyboard shortcuts, CSS styling and control methods.
Kwicks for jQuery started off as a port of the incredibly attractive MooTools framework, but has evolved into a highly customizable and versatile widget.
12. jQuery iPod-style Drilldown Menu
“We created an iPod-style drilldown menu to help users traverse hierarchical data quickly and with control. It’s especially helpful when organizing large data structures that don’t translate well into traditional dropdown or fly-out menus.”
The jQuery File Tree is a configurable AJAX file-browser plug-in for jQuery. You can create a customized, fully-interactive file tree with as little as one line of JavaScript code.
14. How to Create a MooTools Home Page-Inspired Navigation Effect
In this tutorial, you’ll recreate the same effect seen in MooTools’s menu, but in jQuery!
This tutorial demonstrates how to implement inline CSS Sprites2 using jQuery.
Manipulating Content
With some custom JavaScript and jQuery magic you can create some interesting widgets. A good way to demonstrate this functionality is by building a browsable Amazon.com books widget.
This tutorial explains how to use a slider to control the text size of an article on a page. This lets the user control exactly the size that suits them, and is also a pretty impressive feature to have on a site.
Create navigational elements: when you have a large number of items, you can group them into pages and present navigational elements that allow users to move from one page to another.
As with the last tool, groups items together using navigational elements that allow users to move from one page to another.
20. Creating a Slick Auto-Playing Featured-Content Slider
If you love the Coda-Slider plug-in for jQuery, then you will find this plug-in very useful for displaying lots of content in a small area. This nice plug-in adds some features not found in the original Coda-Slider, such as slowly cycling through panels, auto-playing different types of custom content. An arrow indicator serves as a visual indication of which panel you are currently viewing.
A simple horizontal accordion plug-in for jQuery.
Tabular Data and Grids
This tool generically adds a toggle function to any table row you specify based on a CSS class name. It will, by default, toggle on any check boxes within that table row.
Tablesorter is a jQuery plug-in that turns a standard HTML table with <th> and <td> tags into a sortable table without the need for page refreshes. Tablesorter can successfully parse and sort many types of data, including linked data, in a cell.
TableEditor provides flexible in-place editing of HTML tables. User-defined handler functions can easily be dropped in to update, for example, a data source via an AJAX request.
This JavaScript code can be used to convert ordinary HTML tables into scrollable ones.
Lightbox Techniques
Learn how to create a thumbnail photo gallery, where clicking a button reveals the entire photo and more information about that photo.
FancyBox was born to automatically scale large images to fit in windows, adding a nice drop-shadow under the zoomed item. It can be used to group related items and add navigation between them (using a pre-loading function). FancyBox is totally customizable through settings and CSS.
28. Facebox Image and Content Viewer
Facebox is a lightweight Facebook-style Lightbox that can display images, divs, and even entirely remote pages (via AJAX) inline on a page and on demand. It uses the compact jQuery library as its engine, unlike Lightbox v2.0, which uses Prototype.
jQuery.popeye is a plug-in that transforms an unordered list of images into a simple image gallery. When an image is clicked, it enlarges Lightbox-style. The images are displayed in a box with “Previous” and “Next” controls, and information about the images can be included.
Image Galleries and Viewers
Simple Controls Gallery rotates and displays each image by fading it into view over the previous one, with navigation controls that pop up when the mouse hovers over the gallery. The controls allow the user to play, pause or jump to a specific image in the gallery.
This jQuery plug-in allows you to easily create a custom carousel. Use the jQuery UI to enable many different types of transition. The plug-in uses PHP to call images from the folder you specify. Configure many different options including controls, slide timer length, easing type, transition type and more!
Browser Tweaks
32. Setting Equal Heights with jQuery
A script to equalize the heights of boxes within the same container and create a tidy grid.
33. jQuery IE6 PNG Transparency Fix
Another IE6 PNG fix that uses jQuery selectors to automatically fix all PNG images on a page.
This tool helps ease the pain of dealing with IE z-index issues. You can find a demo here.
IE puts scroll bars inside overflowing elements, and if an element is only one line, the scroll bar will cover it. This plug-in fixes that issue.
Lazy Load delays the loading of images below the fold on long pages. As the user scrolls down, the images are loaded as needed. Check out the demo here.
It’s a fairly common design practice to limit the number of characters a user can input in a field while giving feedback on how many spaces are left. This plug-in automates that task.
Animation Effects
Scrollable is a flexible and lightweight (3.9 KB) jQuery plug-in for creating scrollable content. Scrollable items can contain any HTML, such as text, images, forms, video or any combination of them. You can make items scroll horizontally or vertically and decide how many items are visible at once.
39. jQuery Fading Menu – Replacing Content
“Instead of thinking about CSS as page layout and a way to style your page when it loads, you can use in animation and change it on-the-fly to react to events that happen on your page. Take for example a menu. You can take the “click” event that happens when clicking on a menu to do lots of stuff.”
40. Build an Animated Cartoon Robot with jQuery
This effect simulates a faux 3-D animated background reminiscent of old-school side-scrolling video games (and not unlike the parallax effect). This effect is created by layering several empty divs over each other, with transparent PNGs as background images. The backgrounds are animated at different speeds using jQuery.
Flip is a plug-in for jQuery that “flips” page elements in four directions. Compatible with Firefox 2+, Internet Explorer 6+, Safari 3.1 (for Windows) and Google Chrome.
- Download files here.
42. Use jQuery for Background Image Animations
Animate your menu whenever a user hovers over an item with this effect.
Image Manipulation
Jcrop is the quick and easy way to add image-cropping functionality to your Web application. It combines the ease of use of a typical jQuery plug-in with a powerful cross-platform DHTML cropping engine that is faithful to familiar desktop graphics applications.
JQZoom is a JavaScript image magnifier that makes it really easy to magnify what you want. It is easy to customize and works on all modern browsers.
Miscellaneous
A rich date-range widget that uses the jQuery UI’s date picker and some additional custom interaction.
Unordered lists are commonly used to structure a website’s navigation. Having the ability to re-order such lists would be extremely useful. Here is a method to easily save and reload the list element order without getting lost as the page is refreshed.
47. Amazing Music Player Using Mouse Gestures and Hotkeys
Learn how to create an amazing music player, coded in XHTML and jQuery, that makes use of mouse gestures and hotkeys. You can click and drag the mouse to interact with the music player’s interface or use directional keys and the space bar instead of the mouse.
48. jGrowl
jGrowl is a jQuery plug-in that delivers unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X’s Growl Framework works.
Source : www.smashingmagazine.com | www.blog.wezile.com | Haqeel | Mubashir | Trentten





























































