In parallel with the popularity of videos on web, HTML5 video is already being used widely. And, for sound, HTML5 audio is gaining ground for sure.
AreWePlayingYet? is an initiative and open source test suite that aims to bring more harmony into HTML5 Audio implementations.
Using the suite, anyone can easily test HTML5 audio capabilities of a browser and find out the features supported/unsupported.
It is built by SoundCloud and also enables us to quickly add new tests (if wanted).
There are many jQuery slider plugins out there with each having pretty much number of features which usually end up in a big size.
Craftyslide is a jQuery image slider plugin for anyone looking to create a slider with only the standard and most-used features.
It accepts unordered lists, can display captions, has a bullet navigation besides prev-next ones and uses fade animation for transitions.
Such a limited yet (usually) enough functionality only weights 2kb and works on all major browsers.
In the beginning of the web 2.0 trend, tag clouds were one of the most popular items of web design. And, they were (and still are) very useful in helping readers to easily locate the most-used tags.
Afterwards, the Flash-powered animated tag canvas came and it conquered many websites. The Flash -kinda- died, HTML5 is now everywhere and the animated tag cloud is still here for the new web built without Flash.
TagCanvas is an HTML5 canvas powered and animated tag cloud that has both standalone and jQuery plugin versions.
It has support for text +images and can be shaped as a sphere, hcylinder or vcylinder.
The resource has so many settings for maximum customization and works even in IE (thanks to ExplorerCanvas).
WordPressThemeShock, a website that releases high-quality freebies from time-to-time, has just published a huge set of free PSD website templates.
The set consists of 99 templates with well-layered PSD files, each having a homepage and internal page designs.
Such a big resource is very handy not only for using them as templates but also making use of the layers we like on other projects.
P.S. They are free to be used in personal projects and commercial usage requires a license.
iUI is a mobile web framework that has been around for a long time (since 2007) compared to many other mobile resources.
It was mentioned in a previous WRD article (iPhone Application And Website Development: All Tools And Tutorials You Need) and evolved much since then.
The framework includes a JavaScript library, CSS and images for developing touch-enabled web apps.
User interfaces to be created are iPhone-like yet compatible with most smartphones and tablets and has support for menus, forms, lists, image galleries and more.
Also, there are built-in extensions for caching, getting system information, HTML5 videos or theme switching.
iUI is well-documented and has tutorials to get you started easily.
Hovercard is a jQuery plugin that eases displaying information with style when an HTML element of our choice is hovered.
The information box appears with a smooth fading effect and accepts any HTML markup to be used as the content.
It is very useful for enabling users to reach micro info quickly (like a short bio, price of an item, an image, etc.) and comes with built-in Facebook + Twitter integration. Simply, it can display the details of a Facebook page or Twitter user nicely.
There are options for defining its width, position, background color and more.
Also, callback functions exist when hovering in and out from a Hovercard item.
Humane JS is a modern and tiny JavaScript library for displaying customizable notifications.
It has pre-defined notification types: info, success + error which are styled accordingly and new styles/themes can be created easily.
When available, the library uses CSS transitions and falls back to JavaScript animations when needed.
Humane JS doesn't require any JavaScript libraries to function and has several options including: timeout (the delay before a message fades out) or how the notifications can be closed (on any mouse/keyboard/touch action and/or clicking the close button).
And, the library has a callback function that is fired when the notification is displayed with success.
appMobi, a popular platform for creating HTML5-powered mobile apps and websites has recently open sourced several useful resources for mobile developers.
In order to access the device APIs of iOS and Android, creating native apps is not a must. The JavaScript Bridge API brings this functionality to mobile web apps.
The API has support for accessing the camera, notifications, player, display, geolocation and more.
This is a mobile web framework for quickly creating touch-enabled interfaces that run equally good on iOS and Android.
It has on-device caching, offers block-based architecture rather than page based (only necessary block are updated during browsing), supports fixed headers/footers and includes several workarounds for known bugs on mobile web development.
appMobi has also open sourced mobiUs, a mobile browser that offers a native-like experience when browsing web apps.
It enables web apps to access all of the hardware features of a smartphone, has a good game performance with DirectCanvas technology, comes with built-in caching and much more.
And, there is Direct Canvas/Box2D/Sound which helps running web apps (mostly games that require calculations) much faster, play multiple audio files at the same time (HTML5 normally supports 1 at a time), etc.
Fotorama is a highly flexible image gallery plugin for jQuery that works in both desktop and mobile browsers.
It offers multiple options for browsing through the images including thumbnails, prev-next buttons, swiping, slideshow or bullet navigation.
The thumbnails can either be prepared and defined manually for maximum quality or the plugin will display a stretched version of the original images.
Images can have captions, the image to be displayed on initial load can be defined and transition duration can be changed.
There are also multiple options for arranging dimensions and positions of the slider and thumbnails (can be vertical too).
Sharrre is a jQuery plugin that eases creating social sharing widgets for Facebook,Twitter, Google Plus, Digg and Delicious.
The plugin calls the social buttons on demand which is great for minimizing the number of initial requests and improving loading speeds.
Any type of custom designs can be created for the widgets (no need to use the default buttons provided by the social networks) and events(like, +1, tweet, etc.) can be fired up with the plugin's API calls.
P.S. Google Plus widget requires PHP to work (the PHP file is already included in the package).
