Lightview is a jQuery plugin for creating overlay windows (lightboxes).

It features an easy-to-use API and extra media support which is sometimes lacking in other LightBox plugins.

What’s interesting about Lightview is how comprehensive the library is.

It features a powerful API, skinning, callbacks, and has more options than a regular user would need… ever.

Lightview is quite the heavyweight in terms of size, too: ~130kb for all required files.

The license is free for non-commercial use, and licensing for commercial projects starts from 50EUR.

• Website: http://projects.nickstakenburg.com/lightview

Acorn Media Player is a full-scale HTML5 media player.

Acorn doesn’t provide fallbacks, but there’s a logical reason behind it: as videos are marked up with the default <video> tag, you can easily choose your own fallback method.

Among the notable features of the Acorn media player are:

• Full, tab-based keyboard control;
• Fullscreen;
• A number of ready-made themes;
• Buffering;
• Remembers default volume;
• Easy to customize;
• Supports captions via SRT files (like real media players!);

Overall, Acorn is a very promising media player, and it’s definitely a top pick for any page where you want to implement non-YouTube video clips.

• Website: http://ghinda.net/acornmediaplayer/
• Demo: http://ghinda.net/acornmediaplayer/demos.html

Mary Lou at tympanus.net has published another awesome tutorial. This time it’s about achieving a thumbnail proximity effect with jQuery and CSS.

To achieve such effect, Mary Lou suggests using the jQuery proximity plugin, and, as we can see in the demo, it works well, making the artsy images even more beautiful.

This tutorial is useful for refreshing your knowledge about making galleries, and for using the source to create your own-customized thumbnail gallery (e.g., for a portfolio).

• Website: http://tympanus.net/codrops/2012/01/04/thumbnail-proximity-effect/
• Demo: http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/ProximityEffect/

Scrollorama is a jQuery plugin for creating transition effects while scrolling.

Scrollorama uses lettering.js; it allows using every numeric CSS property for transitions while users scroll down the page.

Scrollorama can be used by itself or as a part of some bigger plugin — check out Scrolldeck.js (from the same author) which uses Scrollorama and achieves great results.

animate-enhanced is a jQuery plugin that’s used in place of jQuery’s $.animate().

The plugin detects CSS3 transition support and enables hardware acceleration when possible for a rather large performance boost on WebKit-supported browsers.

Along with CSS3 detection, animate-enhanced introduces several useful features:

• Animation ‘queue’ support;
• Relative value support for animations;
• Easy-to-use callbacks;
• etc.

• Website: http://playground.benbarnett.net/jquery-animate-enhanced/

Instabir is a jQuery plugin for A/B website testing.

Instabir is great for A/B testing in production environments.

The demos page swimmingly covers this plugin’s potential uses; for example, Instabir can be used for conversion testing (which text/design grants the most conversions, et cetera).

Instabir scrupulously logs the users’ actions in different versions of your website, and the results can then be exported to MySQL files.

• Website: http://www.instabir.com/
• Demo: http://www.instabir.com/demos