The following is the second part of a set of jQuery shortcuts I use at some point on a daily basis. If you missed part I, you can see them here.
5. Lightbox 2
Why do I like this? It is simple to integrate and very elegant looking. Need to group images together so the user can page through a gallery? No problem! adding a rel= lightbox tag to any pictures on a page automatically groups the images instantly.
Read more here: http://www.lokeshdhakar.com/projects/lightbox2/
4. $.post
$.post is another powerful function that allows you to do a http post to the server and get back a response which you can then parse and do something with. You can check out my $.post example where I use $.post in conjunction with MVC and a JsonResult.
Read more here: http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax/jQuery.post
3. Watermark
The old AJAX Control Toolkit had a decent textbox watermark control, but when I moved from WebForms to MVC, wanted to find a better jQuery solution. This plugin is simply awesome. It covers everything from your basic textbox watermark to multi-line watermarks for textareas to dynamic watermarks to WebKit support.
Read more here: http://code.google.com/p/jquery-watermark
2. Curvycorners
This is more for style, it helps out programmers like me that can make things look “not ugly” and that’s about it. Using some good old-fashioned javascript, you can turn a boring div into a sleek looking table.
Read more here: http://www.curvycorners.net/
1. Dialog
This awesome wrapper can be found on the jquery.com website in their UI section. You can style and customize a dialog/popup to autoopen when the page loads, display modal, close on escape, allow resizing, etc. It seems that every application I develop needs some type of advanced confirm box, and the dialog always bails me out. A more advanced use of the dialog can be in conjunction with an html table to perform a quick edit for a grid, which will be the subject of a future post.
Read more here: http://jqueryui.com/demos/dialog/
Hope you found this post useful! If there are any others you like feel free to share below.
