Ad Gallery is a jQuery plugin for creating an image gallery/showcase quickly.

The plugin uses unordered lists & converts them by offering lots of options for a better customization.

Some features of the plugin are:

• auto-start from any image
• keyboard navigation support
• custom effects like slide, fade..
• show image descriptions
• clicking the images close to the next-prev buttons will call more thumbnails
• work as a slideshow with start-stop buttons
• & more..

Ad Gallery preloads the images for a flawless display, however, if the image to be shown is not preloaded, it displays a loader & waits for the image to load.

And, depending on the image size to be presented, it auto-arranges the dimensions of the "container div" for a better fit.

Anyone who visited Mashable lately, the popular social news website, might have seen the "drag to share" functionality which appears when hovering an image.

It is a smart technique which encourages visitors to share a story by offering a quite fun usage.

Nettuts+ is sharing a very nice tutorial (with source) that enables you to implement this feature using jQuery & jQuery UI.

It makes use of the draggable & droppable components of jQuery UI to make drag’n dropping & targeting objects possible.

To see how it works, a demo is provided as well.

There are beautiful free image gallery applications (check Galleries category) around but it is hard to find ones that are compatible with iPhones.

Jaipho is a free JavaScript image gallery application that is optimized for iPhone.

It works very similar to the "Photos" application & can display images:

• as a slideshow
• with prev-next buttons
• using finger gestures

And, it has companion named Pipho which is the PHP-powered dynamic version.

Pipho can read photos from a desired folder, creates resized thumbnails, slide images & generates Jaipho JavaScript code automatically.

jQuery-Accessible-RIA is a set of accessible, usable & easy to implement widgets that are strictly WAI WCAG 2.0 and WAI ARIA compliant.

The widgets provided are:

• lightbox
• live form validation
• tabs
• sortable tables

jQuery-Accessible-RIA is built using the jQuery UI & works out-of-the-box. Also, they can be highly customized.

For older screen readers, it includes a workaround & for anyone willing to dive into the code, it is fully-commented.

gRaphaël is an open source JavaScript charting library that is based on Raphaël graphics library (WRD link).

It is capable of generating both static & interactive outputs including pie, bar, line or dot charts.

The charts are created with VML & supports the most popular browsers like Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0.

There are some beautiful demos provided including the interactive pie chart & the dot chart.

Ident Engine is an open source JavaScript library that can bring together the footprints every user leaves on various social networks.

The library supports more than 70 sites, including all the popular ones like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook or Youtube.

From Glenn Jones, the creator of the library:

Wouldn’t it be a little magical if, when you signed up for a new site, the site said something like, “We notice you have a profile photo on Flickr and Twitter, would you like to use one of those or upload a new one?”

Ident Engine makes this totally possible.

It analyzes the relations between various networks using the rel="me" tags & Social Graph API’s "lookup" method.

And, to parse the profiles Yahoo’s YQL or a .Net parser, UfXtract is used.

More technical details can be found at "Discovering Magic", an article by Glenn Jones, and you can always check the demos to see the power of Ident Engine.

It is very usual that a website presenting a list of images which is "longer in size than the viewport of our monitors" & we simply need to scroll to view the rest. In such cases, in order to make the websites load much faster, we can use lazy loading.

What is lazy loading?

It is a design pattern that means; not-loading a content until it is needed. Basically, it is the opposite of "preloading".

The technique is mostly used in websites that have a long list of images & rather than loading all the images at once, we see them load when we try to view them by scrolling down.

How the logic works?

Using JavaScript, it is possible to detect the following:

• the coordinates of the part of the page (x-y) we’re viewing
• the coordinates of a specific element
• the width-height of the viewport

Having these inputs, we can easily understand if a given element is in the viewport or not. And, after it becomes "in", we can make a JavaScript call to load the content.

Here are ready-to-use resources for implementing lazy loading:

Read the rest of this entry »

MilkChart is an easy-to-use yet robust MooTools library for converting tables into charts.

It uses the <canvas> tag and supports the following chart types:

• Column
• Bar
• Line
• Scatter
• Pie

 The library has a bunch of options to customize variables like:

• widths, heights
• font, font size, font color
• chart line colors & weights
• showing row names (on/off)
• & more..

MilkChart does not come with a demo page that you can play with but it is well-documented & a detailed info to start with can be found here.

Web-kreation is sharing a beautifully-crafted sliding login panel that is very handy to be used in websites with limited spaces.

It has 2 versions:

• using MooTools
• using jQuery (improved version in means of design & functionality)

The panel works by overlapping the content rather than pushing it & can be easily converted to be used for any other functionality (like navigation, search, contact form, etc.)

It is also converted into Wordpress plugins:

• Sliding Panel: WordPress Plugin by Justin Tadlock.
• SuperSlider-Login by Twincascos.

P.S. It comes only the HTML-CSS-JavaScript part of the code & doesn’t have an integrated login system. Such a function needs to be adapted while using the code.

OneFileCMS is, just like it sounds, is a tiny content management system which is formed of one file (20.4kb).

It is a database-less PHP script that enables you to view/edit/delete/upload files & folders very quickly.

OneFileCMS is very ideal for anyone who updates their websites by editing the source of the files directly.

It is also a backend for anyone without the need of a FTP connection.

The application has a validated, semantic & commented markup. It is unobtrusive & can be re-branded with ease.