January, 2011

Radio buttons and checkboxes are typically left untouched by the designer’s hand, but truly innovative design demands thinking ‘outside the box’, or in this case, the check box. ;)

ezMark is a jQuery plugin that makes radio buttons and checkboxes a lot more fun, by replacing the same-old buttons with cooler ones.

The plugin is extremely lighweight — ezMark weighs a mere 1.5kb — and works on most major browsers.

The mark-up is easy, and the plugin only has options that relate to the CSS code.

A great supplement, if you’re up for something new.

gvChart is a jQuery plugin for creating interactive, illustrative charts from HTML tables.

The plugin uses Google’s visualization API for creating the charts, hence the name ‘gvChart’.

Basically, the plugin takes data from an HTML table, and then lets the user view the data in Google-like charts. Simple, yet highly effective.

Five chart types are supported – Area chart; Line chart; Bar chart; Column chart; and Pie chart.

You can manipulate the charts via Google’s visualization API.

Although there aren’t that many options, gvChart is nevertheless a powerful plugin, and can see use in any web application that demands that users (or admins) have access to statistics.

Freeow! is a jQuery plugin for making ‘polite’ alerts.

What’s good about the plugin is that it has numerous styles, can by styled with CSS, has numerous options and an extremely simple markup.

You can make the boxes slide in instead of simply appearing; auto-fade can be turned on and off; not to mention that Freeow! even has events you can use.

If easy customization, speed, and easy integration are what makes an excellent jQuery plugin, Freeow! is one.

It does reinvent the wheel a bit, though.

As we struggle to deliver the freshest freebies and services out there, we sometimes stumble on something quite extravagant.

This time the newest freebie is 16 vector shopping bags from newevolutiondesign.com, delivered in the .EPS format.

You’d use these shopping bags for shopping carts; cool designs; your own creations; and, well, they seem suitable for a Twitter background.

There’s a tutorial out at tympanus.net (a great resource), which shows how to make a form that swaps with another depending on the input needed.

The pictures above illustrate the concept — if a user wants to register, the other form pops out in real time, replacing the first one.

The forms can be styled with CSS, and, as always with tympanus.net, the making of this neat plugin is explained thoroughly.

You’d use the plugin for various apps, but it’d come especially handy in smaller web applications or newer projects.

jEditable, a Drupal extension for inline content editing, consists of the quite old Jeditable jQuery plugin and Drupal’s Content Construction Kit.

The script is extremely lightweight (less than 10kb) and fast, yet quite basic.

You’d use for any website that runs on Drupal, and has a lot of content in a single page that needs to be regularly updated.

However, the plugin is limited to editing basic text areas–tougher fields that need validation are yet to be implemented.