Comments for jQuery FTW (May 2) (http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/jquery-ftw-may-2.html)

jQuery FTW (May 2)

2009-05-02T14:42:55Z

Yet another week, yet another jQuery FTW. As always, the point of this is to share interesting/cool/unique jQuery tips/tutorials/sites/etc. If you have a URL you would like to share, please send it to me.

First up is a good blog entry by Brian Rinaldi: Working with Related Sortable Lists in jQuery UI. As you can probably guess, his blog entry talks about the jQuery UI Sortable interaction.
Next up is a Twitter API jQuery plugin. I'm becoming a huge Twitter addict so I was pretty excited to see this. Anyone using this in production?
Another cool plugin is TextboxList. It can turn a list of words into 'tag' looking items. It's a great way to add a tag based UI to your site. It would be cool to mix this with some kind of auto-complete so folks don't have to completely type in a known tag.
DivCorners is a simple plugin to add nicely rounded corners to your web page. One of the interesting features is the ability add some graphics to the header of the item. Be sure to look at the Advanced examples on the demo page.
I'm not a huge accordion fan, but this horizontal accordion widget was kind of interesting.
Another widget, FullCalendar creates a large calendar display. Also cool is support for drag/drop and it's nice to see good support for fetching event data via Ajax. I like the jQuery UI datepicker widget and this widget looks like a good companion.
This Week in jQuery was updated at the jQuery blog.

Comment from Alexander on 2009-05-04

2009-05-04T11:22:27Z

Hi,
Thanks for mentioning the jquery accordion menu :)

Cheers from Germany
Alexander

Comment from Travis Almand on 2009-05-04

2009-05-04T13:13:16Z

DivCorners - this neat and all but I think I'd rather do the same thing in CSS and not rely on javascript. Correct me if I'm wrong but I didn't see anything that could not be done in CSS nor provides benefits beyond CSS. I would want to see something more to it such as dynamically changing from one border to another in different ways, such as fading. The custom header images is the first step in making it interesting. But even that is easily done with CSS.

@Alexander
I'm not a big fan of accordions either but this is a decent plugin. But I don't think the examples do it justice. For instance:

Example 1 - the auto change is nice but it interferes with me choosing what I want to see. If I choose a tab that is not active the next active one eventually takes over. Once I've rolled over something the auto change should stop so I can read the content I chose to see.

Example 2 - say I start at tab 1, I roll over tab 2 and it moves to the left with content, roll over tab 3 and the content moves left but the tab stays. This is confusing. I'm assuming this is configurable.

Example 3 - this is close to a good style but the tabs on the right disappearing to start on the left to scroll back to the right is confusing.

Example 4 - this is by far the best example as it works as one would expect.

Now, again, I'm not saying it's a bad plugin but that the examples just really don't do it justice because the first four examples on a real website would be slightly annoying in each their own way.

Comment from todd sharp on 2009-05-04

2009-05-04T15:43:18Z

Hey Ray, looks like the TextboxList plugin does come with auto complete. I tried it on the demo and it works pretty good.

Nice list BTW - thanks!