Out of smart combination of powerful jquery plugins and functions comes the Minibar, contextual editing menu that pops up in windows Office 2007 fashion. The demo provided works with standard textarea editor but we’d like to see it implemented within tinymce or fckeditor, for instance : no doubt this is coming in the next few hours !!

CloudZoom, A new jquery zoom is here on the market, with features such as image blur, zooming inside the image. It works a bit like jqZoom, which is now a de facto standard for image zooming, but CloudZoom claims to be lighter and certainly is nicer to view.

http://www.professorcloud.com/mainsite/cloud-zoom.htm

After the Mega Drop down menu comes the sroll drop down menu, a solution for long choices display dilemna : Make menu scroll up and down as you mouse through it. http://css-tricks.com/examples/LongDropdowns//

IxEdit is a JavaScript-based interaction design tool for the web taht gives designers and developers a few ready to use jquery tools, such as animation, form enhancements (date picker), and DOM manipulation, all designed within a web based interface. It uses GEARS, a tool developed by google that interfaces browsers with desktop, and the only requirement to start working on a web page is to include the ixedit javascript, plus the jquery libraries.

http://www.ixedit.com/

I usually take superfish for granted when working on a jquery based drop down menu : based on regular ul / li tags, it uses CSS layout directives to position menu items, which I have tried up to 3 levels of navigation. I have just found another good example of submenu implementation that demonstrates the ability to write paragraphs inside the sub layer, as  shown in the illustration below. The tutorial written by Jon Philipps on The Web Squeeze explains how CSS3 manages to implement rounded corners while jquery deals with the drop down effect. Nothing really new, just another way of working with Jquery and layers, but nice.

The new jQuery plugin  “visualize” demonstrates usage of a specific technique that renders visual graphs (pie charts, bars, area, lines) from HTML table data. The process uses JavaScript to scrape data from an HTML table and generate charts using the HTML 5 Canvas element. It  is particularly useful because the data for the visualization already exists in the page in structured tabular format, making it accessible to people who browse the web with a screen reader or other assistive technology. Also the port to Jquery is particularly simple as it is accessible to HTML generated tables, which is most common. The only drawback for this method would be the CPU power required to render large sets of data. But there is a workaround in the form of data aggregation if the origin is SQL based.

Another example of useless feature that could become very useful when a critical mass of web geeks start using ti for specific image display : the jquery parallax plugin order images or elements to respond to mouse effects with a 3D effect. Stunning effect for the display of 3d Landscapes, such as displayed on the plugin homepage, or letter 3D movement, as illustrated in this example. The stephband.info author’s website demonstrates a powerful implmeentation of this plugin.

If you’ve tried the impromptu jquery plugin, you’re probably left with some frustrating feeling, finding that  such an easy solution for javascript alert, confirm and prompt replacement, could be enhanced by a nicer graphic design. Replacing the “X’” letter by a now standard close button, just like can be found on facebox, could do the job. But then why not benefit default facebook style layout and use the whole facebox plugin, or go for another stylish modal jquery plugin, such as jModal… A few lines of javascript code will easily replace the prompt function, just like the lines of code from the example below.
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The popularity of javascript lightboxes has spread over the internet and no serious webmaster could think of displaying images without a specific thumbnailer and / or a dynamic slider of popup. The author of jQuery.popeye had  seen enough lightboxes and decided to implement his own box that features the advantage of being integrated like an image, with comments written below and navigation buttons.

remember our quest for the ideal select box plugin ? seems that Jquery can be proud to deliver one of the best select dropwon box on the opensource market. Select Box Factory covers an impressive list of options : fully skinnable, options images, list filter, first letter selection… Good work.