Simplify.js is a JavaScript library for simplifying polylines.
The library drastically reduces the amount of points that are used to draw a polyline, allowing for a significant performance boost.
As the shape is what’s most important when drawing polylines, the library is all but mandatory if you have data which generates thousands of points in a graph–the performance boost is huge even on small simplification ratios.
Speed Tracer is a free tool for tracking and fixing performance problems in your web apps.
Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome plugin, but server-side performance tracking is available via AppStats for Java.
The application comes with a logging API; Speed Tracer can also export data dumps as JSON objects (probably for creating your own interfaces).
Overall, Speed Tracer is a great tool for any application developer, as fluid performance is what might make users prefer your apps instead of other available alternatives.
Hoverizr is a small (2.5kb minified) jQuery plugin that outputs manipulated images on top of targeted images.
The plugin is responsive, meaning that even if you resize the browser (or use mobile), the images will be resized automatically for newer browsers.
Hoverizr features quite a few image manipulation effects, such as grayscale, invert, and blur.
Besides the obvious “before and after” use of this plugin, it’s also awesome for games or simply design effects.
jsshell is a Chrome widget that allows executing JavaScript and jQuery on any page you browse.
The script allows doing basically anything with the page on client-side. The code window even has an autocomplete feature.
For example, you can do some “defacing” and increase the functionality of the website; or scrape some information from the page, as the developer does in the demo.
jsshell is a powerful plugin, because you can both toy around with websites you use daily; however, the widget is also great for prototyping or simply toying around with, e.g., the design of a page.
money.js is a dependency-free JS library for converting currencies with the Open Source Exchange Rates API.
The library weighs around 1kb minified, and uses the currencies provided by Google (which are consistently accurate and up-to-date).
Using money.js is rather easy, and, although still in its infancy, the plugin provides a seamless way of both analyzing the financial situation of the world, and also treating your international customers fairly if you want to adapt it to an e-commerce store.
Elvin Hayijev from Tutplus.com has published an awesome tutorial that deals with the inner workings of creating a WP plugin that displays interactive site data.
What’s particularly awesome about this tutorial is that it creates a basis of understanding and enlightens as to how one can approach building WP plugins with jQuery. The charts themselves are created with jQplot.
The tutorial explains in-depth about creating a ‘popular categories’ chart; activity by month chart; most commented posts chart; and blog velocity chart.
By itself, the end result is fun to include in your ‘about us’ page or is just a collection of useful data.
04 February, 2012
By Lauris Veips
