Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

MattBango has shared his approach to creating a timeline out of CSS and HTML. The Pure CSS Timeline is a simple and clean looking timeline with some very straight forward markup. We have a nice looking timeline styled completely with CSS, but what happens if the visitor doesn’t have CSS enabled? Since we used unordered lists, we still have a nicely accessible list of events.

The Pure CSS Timeline may not be the perfect solution markup wise and CSS wise, but it gets the job done and is still quite accessible for all users. Take the timeline a step further. You could add some Javascript interactions, tooltips, animations, etc.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://mattbango.com/notebook/web-development/pure-css-timeline/
License: License Free

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Today we’re going to break the mold of the traditional tooltip. This tutorial will demonstrate how to build tooltips that are powered by jQuery, with information pulled from a JSON array. Here’s a look at the final result that we’ll be looking to make:

Our page will have two links. When a user hovers over a link, it will trigger the top banner to change its background image and text based on the entry in a JSON array. See the Demo

We’ll be using a pack of background images in later steps. You can grab those here.

Build the Page Structure

New File: I have called my HTML file ‘json-tooltip.htm” for this tutorial

Our example’s HTML is pretty self explanatory. We’re just blocking out a banner to contain the tooltip information, and then placing all of the normal content below.

Pay special attention to what’s going on with link anchors with a class of “tooltip” though. This is the class that will designate which links are tooltips. Also, you’ll notice that the “rel” attribute contains a number. This is the number we’ll use to associate a specific tooltip to an anchor link. This will become clear in a few steps. (more…)

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Would you like the Scrolling Background Effect like youlove.us? The technique is actually a lot simpler than it looks, it’s based around scrolling a very tall gradient image behind some transparent PNG images. The header image has a transparent background and solid text, while the main page is actually an image with the heading text as transparent cut outs.

The JavaScript is where the real magic happens. They have made use of the jQuery library and Alexander Farkas backgroundposition.js script to help them make the background move. The final result looks very nice. However, it might consume a lot of your CPU resources.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://youlove.us/blog/the-youloveus-scrolling-background-effect…
License: License Free

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DreamCSS has written a tutorial explains how to Create Beautiful jQuery sliders with image description and name. The gallery looks so simple but elegant. The text effect it displays the image title and description is very attractive as well.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://dreamcss.comli.com/jquery sliders/
License: License Free

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With 200 lines of JavaScript, you can drag and drop table content. Content of the HTML table cells can be dragged to the another table cell or another table. Script has built in autoscroll and option to forbid landing to some table cells. Table could have rowspan or colspan cells and different background color for every cell.

In order to detect destination table cells, script calculates all table cell coordinates / dimensions and store them to the arrays. Arrays are searched inside onMouseMove handler and when user release left mouse button, object will drop to the current table location.

Requirements: FireFox 3, Internet Explorer 6 and Google Chrome
Demo: http://www.redips.net/javascript/drag-and-drop-table-content/
License: License Free

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While mimicking the OS X dock and stacks isn’t new, it’s certainly not common. Nettuts has shown us a few ways to do “Outside the Box” Navigation with OS X style docks and stacks navigation.

jQuery OS X Stack and Drop Stack is my favorite navigation style out of the three shown in the tutorial. It’s super lightweight (~1kb). It might be a little awkward having the navigation in the bottom right or left of the browser window but it would certainly be creative and save lots of space.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://nettuts.s3.amazonaws.com/358_jquery…
License: License Free

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Ever wanted those flash iPhone on/off toggle switches on your webpage? Love jQuery? Well then Thomas Reynolds has got something special for you. iPhone Style Checkboxes implements the iPhone toggles as replacements for standard HTML checkboxes.

Simply run the script and your site will be updated with these specialized controls. Best of all, the underlying checkbox is not touched and backend system will never know the difference. The change is purely visual.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://awardwinningfjords.com/2009/06/16/iphone-style-checkboxes.html
License: License Free

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Many websites offer syndication formats such as RSS, JSON, or XML based services to allow for easy content delivery. But what happens when a website doesn’t offer one of these services? How do you syndicate content from a website that doesn’t offer a news feed?

Nettus has gaven us a a simple solution using JQuery’s AJAX functions and PHP’s cURL library that allows us to syndicate external content. This is a simple solution if you require content from an external website.

Although JQuery’s easy syntax and CSS-selectors give us the convenience of styling and selecting what we want from the client-side, this is not speed optimized. Remember you have no control over whether or not the content creator changes what tags and classes they use, it is always best to style general elements that will be commonly used.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/how-to-syndicate-content…
License: License Free

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jQueryforDesigners has added a scrolling carousel that worked in the same way the carousel worked on the Apple Mac ads page. They have published a tutorial which walk through the fundamentals of scrolling carousel, and how they have created jQuery Infinite Carousel.

The trick is building the DOM with the cloned nodes, because we’ve cloned the start of the list to the end of the list, when we scroll off the last items, it looks like we’ve looped back round. Once the animation completes, we change the scrollLeft position back to the real first items.

This scrollLeft isn’t visible to the user since the overflow is hidden, and so it creates the effect of being infinitely sliding from left or right.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://jqueryfordesigners.com/demo/infinite-carousel.html
License: License Free

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The choice of free fonts is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects.

SmashingMagazine has published Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts For Your Designs, which presents you Chunk, Titilium, Amputa Bangiz, Serif Beta, Quatro, Rough Draft, Comfortaa and a couple of other high-quality free fonts. All of them look really professional, I am sure you will find them useful for your projects.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/05/beautiful…
License: License Free

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