Users with modern browsers are increasing each day and making use of features like HTML5 audio sounds more and more logical.
AudioPlayer.js is a jQuery plugin for quickly placing a HTML5-powered audio player to any web page.
The player’s interface is chic (doesn’t use any images for that), has a responsive layout and touch support.
It has the major controls (play/pause, volume and duration) and weights only 4kb.
phpFreeChat is a free and open source PHP chat application that doesn’t require any database to run but rather uses the filesystem for it.
It can be used at the same time by any number of users, has a responsive layout that works in mobile too and has a modular authentication system which can be integrated into any app.
The application has 2 parts:
- server: a PHP-powered engine that accepts REST commands and handles the chat logic
- client: a jQuery plugin that communicates with the server and displays the chat interface
phpFreeChat is pretty simple in functionality yet support for multiple rooms, smileys and a “new message notification” will be added soon.
Lately, I was in a search for a jQuery range slider, jQuery UI’s slider widget was the first that I thought of.
It had all the features I needed: working as a single or range slider, default values and man/maxvalues. However, the smallest download size for it was still ~40kb. Too much for a slider.
Tried many others, they were good but almost each of them was missing a feature I needed (that you may not need).
And I found noUiSlider. It had all the things I was looking for and with a size of 2.7kb.
There is support for single or double handles, custom starting values, vertical/horizontal orientation and the ability to get /set values.
Also, it works on touch devices and can be customized with CSS completely. Just a perfect widget for any UI.
GoodUI is a website that regularly shares handy tips for creating “converting and easy-to-use” user interfaces.
The tips are described in detail, visualized nicely and usually easy to apply.
Some of the tips in the list include: “try recommending instead of showing equal choices” or “try undos instead of prompting for confirmation”.
New tips are being added regularly and they a mailing list to update you about these fresh items.
CSS frameworks are great to save time from recreating rules for typography, forms, tables, etc.
However, they are not that great for everyone. There are many designers/developers that prefer to recreate such stuff from scratch so that each of their work looks/feels different. Or, many others have their own CSS snippets that fasten the development.
If you are one of these designers/developers and looking for only a grid system but nothing more, Fitgrd can be a good fit : ).
Fitgrd is a responsive grid system with 12 columns and no strict sizes for the min-max widths.
Each column has 2 percent of margin on both sides and everything works with percentages.
Chartkick is a Ruby gem (also has a JavaScript API which doesn’t require Ruby) for creating good-looking charts very easily and quickly.
It integrates with 2 charting libraries: Highcharts and Google Charts where it is possible to use the same functions for generating charts with each library.
There is support for multiple chart types and multiple series in a single chart.
And, like mentioned there is also Chartkick.js which brings the same functionality to the client-side, without Ruby.
Windows is a lightweight jQuery plugin for nicely scrolling the full-screen.
It provides a simple and handy API for managing the page/content position to ease the browsing experience.
The plugin can analyze if a defined content is in the viewport, how much of it is in the viewport and can trigger any actions like focusing the page to the content by scrolling it.
When building any map-related applications, there are many popular providers to select from like Google Maps or Bing Maps and they provide APIs for integration.
However, using an open source engine and the ability to switch providers anytime offers more freedom + flexibility.
Cesium, a WebGL-powered JavaScript mapping library, offers just that by being provider-agnostic.
It has support for 3 different views: 3D globe, 2D map, and 2.5D Columbus View where transitioning from one to another is just a line of code.
Drawing any type of shapes, highlighting specific regions and interacting with the map using mouse or touch is pretty easy.
Cesium comes as a single JS file and work in all major browsers including mobile.
It is so good that the web gets more and more lightweight with the use of modern web technologies.
Few days ago, WRD had shared the pure CSS gallery and now CSS Modal, a solution to create modal boxes with CSS.
They can be used to display any HTML content and designed to work in responsive layouts.
JavaScript is used only for improving the experience (Esc key support, firing events..) and it is also available as a SASS plugin.
For any dynamic website, if it is not the performance of the network/server, database queries are usually the source of performance issues.
They should be optimized for sure and minimized with the help of caching.
phpFastCache is an open source PHP caching library that comes as a single-file and can be integrated so quickly.
It has support for multiple caching methods (apc, memcache, memcached, wincache, files, pdo and mpdo), the period of caching can be defined and has a very simplified API.
