A Path Less Taken

It’s been a while since I posted about this and as I look for sliders I thought I would update you on some additional cool jQuery Plugins that I’ve come across. Enjoy!

• Nivo Slider – The worlds’ most awesome jQuery slider.
• arbor.js – a graph visualization library using web workers and jQuery
• Awkard Showcase – They call it a Content Slider, but as they state it can do more then just slide the content with tooltips, thumbnails, dynamic height and lots more.
• Nice & Clean Sliding Login Panel – Nice & Clean Sliding Login Panel Built With JQuery.

Ok, right off I have to tell you this article is a biased perspective on the difference between MooTools and jQuery. The bias is not mine, but that of the author. Aaron Newton (of Clientcide fame?) and a core committer to the MooTools Javascript Framework penned jQuery vs MooTools. Apparently it was a blog post of such gravity that Aaron decided it needed it’s own domain name. Sweet! You might wonder why Aaron wants to spend so much energy comparing MooTools to jQuery, a competing Javascript Framework. I think the answer is simple. jQuery is kicking the proverbial dog dodo out of other Javascript Frameworks in terms of user base and general popularity.

In a recent article on the web magazine A List Apart author Lyle Mullican published an interesting discussion of password form fields on the web. The article entitled The Problem with Passwords discusses how passwords might evolve on the web to provide better usability while maintaining user confidence in the system. If you are interested in the evolution of token based computer security then this article is worth a read. It’s focus is on the user experience, but the questions it considers give you a peek into the mind set required to meld strong security with usability.

qTip is an excellent jQuery plugin created by Craig Thompson. It is built on top of the jQuery Javascript library and allows web developers to build flexible, well formatted and easy to use tool tips. I decided to use qTip for my latest web app and was able to get up and running pretty quickly. I did run into one issue that I thought was worth pointing out to help you avoid the same sticking point that I encountered with my approach.

I was looking for a useful confirmation dialog using jQuery and I found this link. With help from the post author and from the comments I was able to create my own very slightly modified approach that works pretty well and allows for inline generation of the confirmation message in your HTML. Here is what I did.