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Home > Front End Development, Javascript, development Tools > Jquery Tools: A Jquery UI Alternative

Jquery Tools: A Jquery UI Alternative

June 5th, 2009

JQuery Tools – is a JQuery library that offers a pretty impressive set of useful tools.

jqeury-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.

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  1. June 15th, 2009 at 04:15 | #1

    JQuery Tools? It is the first time I hear this. Maybe I have to spend some time on this.

  2. June 20th, 2009 at 23:38 | #2

    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.

  3. June 20th, 2009 at 23:51 | #3

    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 ;)

  4. July 15th, 2009 at 17:25 | #4

    @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.

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