Jquery Tools: A Jquery UI Alternative
JQuery Tools – is a JQuery library that offers a pretty impressive set of useful tools.

Here is a list of the tools and a brief description of what they do.
Tabs
A light weight library that allows you to create a tabbed menu with little to no trouble.
- Light Weight (2.5kb)
In comparison to the JQuery UI library (130kb), this is a drastic size difference / loading time. - Accordions
The tab library allows for the tabs to be used as accordions (both horizontal and vertical). - Browser History
The tabs don’t break the browser history. You can switch tabs, then press the back button on the browser and you will return to the previous tab. - Cross Linking
You can link into a tab. Nice feature to have. - Animations
You can animate and customize the tabs as you please.
Tooltip
Create a simple tool tip for your projects quick and easily. Great for forms, and other help items.
- Simple
They have made it super simple to add a tool tip to your web pages. Very handy for forms. - Can Style with CSS
You can style the tool tips as you please.
Scrollable
Create a gallery of scrolling items. These are great for news tickers or catalogs.
- Horizontal or Vertical
You can have it as either a vertical or horizontal scrolling gallery. - Dynamic addition and removal of items
You can add and remove items on the fly. Allows you to create a very dynamic scrollable gallery. - Automatic Scrolling
Allow your gallery to scroll periodically. You have a few attributes that you can tweak to get it the way you like.
Overlay
Create and customize a modal pop-up window. Great alternative to browser pop-ups.
- Style with CSS
You can customize the overlay the you like. - Load External Pages
Load in external pages into your modal window.
Expose
Puts emphasis on the selected item by darkening the background.
- Background Graphics
You can change the background graphics to your liking. - Style with CSS
Customize your colors and opacity with CSS.
Flashembed
A simple way to embed Flash while using JQuery’s selectors.
- Easy
It is nice and easy to quickly embed Flash into your web pages. Comparable to SWFObject. - light weight(5kb)
Nice and small to help with loading times.
Overall it is a nice collection. I’m really loving the size of the library. Functionality without the loading times. That has been my one complaint about the JQuery UI.
To see which browsers it is compatible with visit their browser support page, and here is the download page.

















JQuery Tools? It is the first time I hear this. Maybe I have to spend some time on this.
Google hosting your jQuery is a 100% bad idea. It is like parking your car at your friends parking lot a few blocks away.
Google occasionally has slowdowns. I have no need for an additional critical point of failure for my websites.
Not necessarily. Because it such a common include odds are your browser will already have it cached from a different site, so the user won’t have to download it all, hows that for speed
@ZK@Web Marketing Blog
Not true at all. Like “admin” said, it’s cached in your browser so, even if Google slows down it won’t slow down the download time because it isn’t downloaded. For example:
Site A: Hosts from Google
Site B: Hosts from Google
Site C: Has their own version
Site D: Hosts from Google
When you get to site C you have to redownload it, but once you go to Site D it’s cached from A, so download time will be the same as site B. Even if when you get to B or D if Google slowed down you wouldn’t even notice it.
Also, C’mon, what’s the chance of Google shutting down? You honestly have a better chance of your own site being, hacked, shut off, lose power, fire (like Dotster), and other stuff.