Flow Slider is a jQuery image slider plugin which reminds us the once-popular Flash sliders that respond to mouse interactions.

It works by converting an unordered list into a slider and can be browsed by hovering to the right or left side of it.

The plugin can be completely customized in means of design and functionality. There are options for transition type and speed, acceleration, starting position and much more.

jQuery Geo is a plugin for the popular framework that provides an easy-to-use API for map/geolocation related actions.

The plugin uses the open source map servers like Open Street Map, WMS and Esri ArcGIS (Open Street Map by default) for pulling the map data and can:

• show mapping data and handle direct user interaction with the map
• use geospatial functions like calculating bounding boxes, measuring the distance between geometries, etc.

The maps created are mobile-friendly and have lots of built-in methods for customization.

jQuery Geo is very well-documented and supported with a bunch of examples.

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.

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.

JavaScript Bridge API

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.

aUX.js

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.

Others

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).

Some of us are already familiar with Node.js and for some others, it is probably "another new development tool/language/standard that is getting popular but what the heck..".

Node.js is really getting popular + being used more and more each day and it deserves this attention with the flexibility and performance if offers.

What is Node.js?

In a single definition: Node.js is a server-side JavaScript environment that uses an asynchronous event-driven model.

JavaScript is mostly ran/rendered on the client-side, in the browsers. However, Node.js is a server-side JavaScript interpreter and allows us to handle and make requests via JavaScript.

It is so fast as the engine is powered by the Google's V8 JavaScript Engine, runs under a single thread and every I/O operation is asynchronous which means no waiting for I/O operations of other requests.

A Node.js application can handle thousands of concurrent connections with minimum resource usage

Also, the ability to share code between the server and client-side is another plus. For ex: you can easily run the same form validation code on both sides.

It is not alone in the world of server-side JavaScript as there are other solutions like Aptana Jaxer, Ringo, Narwhal or EJScript. And, running JavaScript in the server is not something new as well considering classic ASP with IIS can do that too. But, things running asynchronously changes many things.

How to learn Node.js?

There are already a good number of tutorials and (e)books on Node.js. Here are some great ones to start with:

• The official Node.js documentation
  
• Mastering Node (an open source e-book)
• The Node Beginner Book (an open source e-book)
• Up and Running with NodeJS (an open source e-book)
• Felix's Node.js Guide (a detailed guide)
• How To Node (a blog on Node.js)
• Node Tuts (podcasts on Node.js)

There are many modules and resources to easily get going with Node.js. Also, some great open source applications built with it. Here they are:

Node Development

npm (Node Package Manager)

The popular package manager for Node.js which can be used for installing and publishing Node programs.

Also, it can manage dependencies and the website has a package-search-engine.

Socketbug

A remote debugging tool built with Node.js and Socket.io which enables your mobile application to send/receive messages from other connected devices (mostly mobile in this case) to your desktop browser.

P.S. It was previously mentioned at WRD.

Socket.IO

Socket.IO brings WebSockets real-time communications to every browser whether they support it or not.

It has several transport methods like WebSockets, Adobe® Flash® Socket or JSONP Polling and the best method for the client's browser is selected automatically.

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like there is almost no limit in minimizing the weight of the web pages we are creating.

For the JavaScript part, 140byt.es (a tweet-sized, fork-to-play, community-curated collection of JavaScript) is sharing a set of very useful tips for saving bytes.

They are simply smart replacements for the functions, equations, loops, etc that we are regularly using.

An example from conditionals:

• Before: if(a)if(b)return c
• After: return a&&b&&c

A good number of bytes saved : ). The bytes saved are definitely minimal but trying to keep things small and focusing on this is definitely a good habit (but also it is worth considering that such usage can make the code unreadable for other coders).