We just would like to introduce you some effects or solutions which you may think are made using Javascript (or his friends) but after reading this post, you would be proud of CSS! All of them are made using Pure CSS.

In today’s AddyOsmani.com shares 20 jQuery Plugins that I think could really improve your user interface in just a few minutes. Some of them require a little more customization or integration than others, but on the whole, the plugins in this post will hopefully give you the inspiration and implementations you need to give your projects that little extra something.

Are you looking for free clone scripts of popular websites. Just take a look at this following list. Complete free best clone jQuery, Ajax, PHP and MySQL scripts with live previews

Nowadays, using jQuery effects is getting increasingly popular within web templates and if you check some of new designed themes on themeforest , you probably can’t find a popular theme without any kind of jQuery effects. One of those effects that designers use it widely is jQuery image slideshow or image gallery…

A well designed user interface is the prima-facie medium for user attraction. A good user interface can impress users and improve the reputation of a website. This collection of jQuery Plugins For A Better User Interface help you design attractive and intuitive user interface to communicate well with users.

Remember those days which almost every website has a Flash intro or header that makes you wait un? forever. Now more and more people are using jQuery animation function to make their sites interesting. Let?s see how we do it.

Being indexed by Google is a big success for any website because it gives access to billions of potential visitors. However, with all of the millions of websites jockeying for position in Google’s databases, your website might not get any traffic.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you were able to browse multiple tabs in your browser without actually switching between them? Why not try a cool new site googlegooglegooglegoogle.com or Goog4 (4 times google). This new site developed & designed by...

Web form is probably one of the most important sections on the web site.Below 10 Amazing Web Forms Design Tutorials.

Or maybe you need a stylish but functional admin panel for a client whom you’ve just built a complex CMS for, but you aren’t a designer. There are an infinite number of possible problems you could be facing and fortunately, there are solutions.

1. Airmail! – Customizable Email Template

“Airmail is a professionally built and designed custom HTML email template! Perfect for just about anyone – usable for everything from newsletters to eFlyers to whitepapers.”

2. Simpla Admin – Flexible & User Friendly Admin skin

“Simpla Admin is a professional template with a beautiful and user friendly interface. With various smart and intuitive jQuery functions, navigating the interface is a breeze.”

3. CleanMail – Email Template Package – 5 Colors!

“CleanMail is a simple yet sexy email template package with 5 different color schemes!”

4. WordPress Wiki Theme

“If you’re looking for a Knowledge Base or Wiki for your company but don’t want or need a full blown Wiki Application. This is the theme for you. Built with a custom Frequently Asked Questions plugin to help extend the functionality of your web site. The plugin acts as a custom write panel that displays in essence short FAQs below posts in their respective categories. The FAQs are searchable and paginate and are not required.”

5. Marketplace Community WordPress Theme

“Marketplace is a both clean and stylish WordPress theme with the intent and focus on creating a community site for industry news, tutorials, etc. This theme includes many popular built in features seen in today’s industry leading community sites. This themes comes with 5 different color options to choose from.”

6. vCard Professional Portfolio

“This is a professional and clean vCard based on Tim Van Damme’s website. With this design you can use almost any background.”

7. Sleek Server Error Pages

“This is a clean, web 2.0 design for website / server error pages. It is flexible and very easy to customize. It comes with 5 of the most common error pages (404, 403, 401, 500 and 503) but it’s very easy to add more if needed. All text is real text so adding more pages is a breeze, no image editing required.”

8. NEOTERIC—The Ultimate Under Construction Page!

“NEOTERIC is a clean single page ‘Under Construction/Coming Soon’ template in 10 SKINS designed to keep your users up to date on your site’s progress.”

9. Under Construction Page with Twitter & Pie Graph!

“Make sure your visitors know whats going on with this Under construction site template that features a feed of your latest tweets (which can be easily removed if you dont use twitter) and a pie chart that is easy to change to reflect your progress!”

10. Minimo – A minimal one page portfolio theme

“Minimo is a simple and attractive one page portfolio showcase theme. This theme is built using the 960.gs grid system framework, giving it a structured and professional look and features custom designed icons. Included is a form mail script, so the entire site works out of the box, simply add your destination email address.”

Conclusion

When working on projects for your clients, what kinds of templates do you find yourself most in need of? Thanks for reading!

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Here are 3 shiny web applications to help you battle your daily work-flow. Enjoy.

How do you find out if you made enough as a freelancer after the job was completed?

A couple of days ago I wrote a lengthy tutorial about creating scrolling tables with fixed headers. I thought I could take the exercise a step further by creating a jQuery plugin to keep the code contained in one location and allow users to call the "chromatable()" method on any table, or many tables on the same page.

Some time ago I was doing some proof of concept: how Visual Studio docking functionality can be done with jQuery and unordered lists. Basically, the main goal was to implement multiple docking and undocking functionality. This tutorial will show you the results of PoC.

The post is complete with examples and explanation over PHP, CSS, jQuery, and finally jQuery UI.
So what is the problem? The title: An Awesome CSS3 Lightbox Gallery With jQuery

At the end of the day, the total size of the demo is massive, compared with what it offers, plus the only piece of CSS3 in the stylesheet is a box-shadow and a rotation via -webkit-transform.

Is That It?

If we can define awesome a basic usage of CSS3 requiring both jQuery and jQuery UI to create a Gallery, included a server side language, how can we define my latest experiment realized in half an hour and without using JavaScript, PHP, or whatever programming language at all?

The answer is simple: CSS3 and we can read how I did it via the not-minified and hopefully well commented css file.
OK, agreed my page is dynamically fake and a proof of concept, but honestly, which title would consider appropriate for above example?
Thanks in any case to Tutorialzine for the interesting step by step explanation and to let me try above experiment which works with latest WebKit, Chrome, Safari, and somehow with Firefox, I’ve not tried the nightly, and Opera as well but in latter cases without transitions.

P.S. for those with poor computation performances like me, here there is a fluid concept variation ;-)

Section 1: Learning the Basics

The key to learning how to effectively use regular expressions is to just take a day and memorize all of the symbols. This is the best advice I can possibly offer. Sit down, create some flash cards, and just memorize them! Here are the most common:

• . – Matches any character, except for line breaks if dotall is false.
• * – Matches 0 or more of the preceding character.
• + – Matches 1 or more of the preceding character.
• ? – Preceding character is optional. Matches 0 or 1 occurrence.
• \d – Matches any single digit
• \w – Matches any word character (alphanumeric & underscore).
• [XYZ] – Matches any single character from the character class.
• [XYZ]+ – Matches one or more of any of the characters in the set.
• $ – Matches the end of the string.
• ^ – Matches the beginning of a string.
• [^a-z] – When inside of a character class, the ^ means NOT; in this case, match anything that is NOT a lowercase letter.

Yep – it’s not fun, but just memorize them. You’ll be thankful if you do!

Tools

You can be certain that you’ll want to rip your hair out at one point or another when an expression doesn’t work, no matter how much it should – or you think it should! Downloading the RegExr Desktop app is essential, and is really quite fun to fool around with. In addition to real-time checking, it also offers a sidebar which details the definition and usage of every symbol. Download it!.

Section 2: Regular Expressions for Dummies: Screencast Series

The next step is to learn how to actually use these symbols! If video is your preference, you’re in luck! Watch the five lesson video series, “Regular Expressions for Dummies.”

Section 3: Regular Expressions and JavaScript

In this final section, we’ll review a handful of the most important JavaScript methods for working with regular expressions.

1. Test()

This one accepts a single string parameter and returns a boolean indicating whether or not a match has been found. If you don’t necessarily need to perform an operation with the a specific matched result – for instance, when validating a username – “test” will do the job just fine.

Example

var username = 'JohnSmith';
alert(/[A-Za-z_-]+/.test(username)); // returns true

Above, we begin by declaring a regular expression which only allows upper and lower case letters, an underscore, and a dash. We wrap these accepted characters within brackets, which designates a character class. The “+” symbol, which proceeds it, signifies that we’re looking for one or more of any of the preceding characters. We then test that pattern against our variable, “JohnSmith.” Because there was a match, the browser will display an alert box with the value, “true.”

2. Split()

You’re most likely already familiar with the split method. It accepts a single regular expression which represents where the “split” should occur. Please note that we can also use a string if we’d prefer.

var str = 'this is my string';
alert(str.split(/\s/)); // alerts "this, is, my, string"

By passing “\s” – representing a single space – we’ve now split our string into an array. If you need to access one particular value, just append the desired index.

var str = 'this is my this string';
alert(str.split(/\s/)[3]); // alerts "string"

3. Replace()

As you might expect, the “replace” method allows you to replace a certain block of text, represented by a string or regular expression, with a different string.

Example

If we wanted to change the string “Hello, World” to “Hello, Universe,” we could do the following:

var someString = 'Hello, World';
someString = someString.replace(/World/, 'Universe');
alert(someString); // alerts "Hello, Universe"

It should be noted that, for this simple example, we could have simply used .replace(’World’, ‘Universe’). Also, using the replace method does not automatically overwrite the value the variable, we must reassign the returned value back to the variable, someString.

Example 2

For another example, let’s imagine that we wish to perform some elementary security precautions when a user signs up for our fictional site. Perhaps we want to take their username and remove any symbols, quotation marks, semi-colons, etc. Performing such a task is trivial with JavaScript and regular expressions.

var username = 'J;ohnSmith;@%';
username = username.replace(/[^A-Za-z\d_-]+/, '');
alert(username); // JohnSmith;@%

Given the produced alert value, one might assume that there was an error in our code (which we’ll review shortly). However, this is not the case. If you’ll notice, the semi-colon immediately after the “J” was removed as expected. To tell the engine to continue searching the string for more matches, we add a “g” directly after our closing forward-slash; this modifier, or flag, stands for “global.” Our revised code should now look like so:

var username = 'J;ohnSmith;@%';
username = username.replace(/[^A-Za-z\d_-]+/g, '');
alert(username); // alerts JohnSmith

Now, the regular expression searches the ENTIRE string and replaces all necessary characters. To review the actual expression – .replace(/[^A-Za-z\d_-]+/g, ”); – it’s important to notice the carot symbol inside of the brackets. When placed within a character class, this means “find anything that IS NOT…” Now, if we re-read, it says, find anything that is NOT a letter, number (represented by \d), an underscore, or a dash; if you find a match, replace it with nothing, or, in effect, delete the character entirely.

4. Match()

Unlike the “test” method, “match()” will return an array containing each match found.

Example

var name = 'JeffreyWay';
alert(name.match(/e/)); // alerts "e"

The code above will alert a single “e.” However, notice that there are actually two e’s in the string “JeffreyWay.” We, once again, must use the “g” modifier to declare a “global search.

var name = 'JeffreyWay';
alert(name.match(/e/g)); // alerts "e,e"

If we then want to alert one of those specific values with the array, we can reference the desired index after the parentheses.

var name = 'JeffreyWay';
alert(name.match(/e/g)[1]); // alerts "e"

Example 2

Let’s review another example to ensure that we understand it correctly.

var string = 'This is just a string with some 12345 and some !@#$ mixed in.';
alert(string.match(/[a-z]+/gi)); // alerts "This,is,just,a,string,with,some,and,some,mixed,in"

Within the regular expression, we created a pattern which matches one or more upper or lowercase letters – thanks to the “i” modifier. We also are appending the “g” to declare a global search. The code above will alert “This,is,just,a,string,with,some,and,some,mixed,in.” If we then wanted to trap one of these values within the array inside of a variable, we just reference the correct index.

var string = 'This is just a string with some 12345 and some !@#$ mixed in.';
var matches = string.match(/[a-z]+/gi);
alert(matches[2]); // alerts "just"

Splitting an Email Address

Just for practice, let’s try to split an email address – nettuts@tutsplus.com – into its respective username and domain name: “nettuts,” and “tutsplus.”

var email = 'nettuts@tutsplus.com';
alert(email.replace(/([a-z\d_-]+)@([a-z\d_-]+)\.[a-z]{2,4}/ig, '$1, $2')); // alerts "nettuts, tutsplus"

If you’re brand new to regular expressions, the code above might look a bit daunting. Don’t worry, it did for all of us when we first started. Once you break it down into subsets though, it’s really quite simple. Let’s take it piece by piece.

.replace(/([a-z\d_-]+)

Starting from the middle, we search for any letter, number, underscore, or dash, and match one ore more of them (+). We’d like to access the value of whatever is matched here, so we wrap it within parentheses. That way, we can reference this matched set later!

@([a-z\d_-]+)

Immediately following the preceding match, find the @ symbol, and then another set of one or more letters, numbers, underscore, and dashes. Once again, we wrap that set within parentheses in order to access it later.

\.[a-z]{2,4}/ig,

Continuing on, we find a single period (we must escape it with “\” due to the fact that, in regular expressions, it matches any character (sometimes excluding a line break). The last part is to find the “.com.” We know that the majority, if not all, domains will have a suffix range of two – four characters (com, edu, net, name, etc.). If we’re aware of that specific range, we can forego using a more generic symbol like * or +, and instead wrap the two numbers within curly braces, representing the minimum and maximum, respectively.

 '$1, $2')

This last part represents the second parameter of the replace method, or what we’d like to replace the matched sets with. Here, we’re using $1 and $2 to refer to what was stored within the first and second sets of parentheses, respectively. In this particular instances, $1 refers to “nettuts,” and $2 refers to “tutsplus.”

Creating our Own Location Object

For our final project, we’ll replicate the location object. For those unfamiliar, the location object provides you with information about the current page: the href, host, port, protocol, etc. Please note that this is purely for practice’s sake. In a real world site, just use the preexisting location object!

We first begin by creating our location function, which accepts a single parameter representing the url that we wish to “decode;” we’ll call it “loc.”

function loc(url) { }

Now, we can call it like so, and pass in a gibberish url :

var l = loc('http://www.somesite.com?somekey=somevalue&anotherkey=anothervalue#theHashGoesHere');

Next, we need to return an object which contains a handful of methods.

function loc(url) { return { }
}

Search

Though we won’t create all of them, we’ll mimic a handful or so. The first one will be “search.” Using regular expressions, we’ll need to search the url and return everything within the querystring.

return { search : function() { return url.match(/\?(.+)/i)[1]; // returns "somekey=somevalue&anotherkey=anothervalue#theHashGoesHere" }
}

Above, we take the passed in url, and try to match our regular expressions against it. This expression searches through the string for the question mark, representing the beginning of our querystring. At this point, we need to trap the remaining characters, which is why the (.+) is wrapped within parentheses. Finally, we need to return only that block of characters, so we use [1] to target it.

Hash

Now we’ll create another method which returns the hash of the url, or anything after the pound sign.

hash : function() { return url.match(/#(.+)/i)[1]; // returns "theHashGoesHere"
},

This time, we search for the pound sign, and, once again, trap the following characters within parentheses so that we can refer to only that specific subset – with [1].

Protocol

The protocol method should return, as you would guess, the protocol used by the page – which is generally “http” or “https.”

protocol : function() { return url.match(/(ht|f)tps?:/i)[0]; // returns 'http:'
},

This one is slightly more tricky, only because there are a few choices to compensate for: http, https, and ftp. Though we could do something like – (http|https|ftp) – it would be cleaner to do: (ht|f)tps?
This designates that we should first find either an “ht” or the “f” character. Next, we match the “tp” characters. The final “s” should be optional, so we append a question mark, which signifies that there may be zero or one instance of the preceding character. Much nicer.

Href

For the sake of brevity, this will be our last one. It will simply return the url of the page.

href : function() { return url.match(/(.+\.[a-z]{2,4})/ig); // returns "http://www.somesite.com"
}

Here we’re matching all characters up to the point where we find a period followed by two-four characters (representing com, au, edu, name, etc.). It’s important to realize that we can make these expressions as complicated or as simple as we’d like. It all depends on how strict we must be.

Our Final Simple Function:

function loc(url) { return { search : function() { return url.match(/\?(.+)/i)[1]; }, hash : function() { return url.match(/#(.+)/i)[1]; }, protocol : function() { return url.match(/(ht|f)tps?:/)[0]; }, href : function() { return url.match(/(.+\.[a-z]{2,4})/ig); } }
}

With that function created, we can easily alert each subsection by doing:

var l = loc('http://www.net.tutsplus.edu?key=value#hash'); alert(l.href()); // http://www.net.tutsplus.com
alert(l.protocol()); // http: ...etc.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I’m Jeffrey Way…signing off.

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Andreas Ritter has managed to encode JPEGs in Javascript. This blog post explains how he did it, shows some benchmarks, and provides a demo and a downloadable library so you can play along at home.

It was surprising that it was that easy to get the first js-encoded jpeg displayed in the browser. Of course I didn't want to stop there. I wanted to optimize things as much as I could to make the encoder fast. This took me several days. I found optimized encoder versions for flash and haxe floating around the net (Faster JPEG Encoding with Flash Player 10) and tried the optimizations used there in my javascript version. As you can seen in the benchmarks below I was quite successful.

Another idea was to use the new web workers to do the heavy lifting in an separate thread, not blocking the gui. This is something flash can't do. So I created a version using a web worker for the encoding.

The API gives you a JPEGEncoder or an alternative JPEGEncoderThreaded. Usage is straightforward:

I think the results show that JavaScript is quite fast (at least in Safari and Chrome). A little over 4 seconds for the non-threaded version is a very good [sic] result, when compared to the 3,3 seconds the optimized flash jpeg encoder takes. Please note, that JavaScript has no static types, no byte array, no Vector-class and is not pre-compiled. Taking these facts into account Nitro and V8 are faster than the ActionScript 3 VM.

Comparing the different browsers Nitro and V8 are a magnitude faster than TraceMonkey. Firefox 3.6b2 shows some improvements, but it's still a long way. Probably the Mozilla guys should consider adopting Nitro or V8?

He used the AS3 (ActionScript) JPEG encoder as a starting point. It's worth noting there's also a PNGEncoder there too; that's a port waiting to happen.

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CBC Radio 3 is a community, radio station and user-generated independent music library which is a small department of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. When the CBC Radio 3 web team was called upon to rebuild the site we were confronted with the technical problem of having an uninterrupted music experience for our users. The old design of the site (see image) achieved this by embedding a flash player in the body with the content being served through a statically positioned iframe in the center of the page. Radio 3's content offerings were outgrowing the design so we went with a full page 1000px-wide layout with the player resting in the page. This created an obvious hurdle being that with a fresh page load comes a bad listening experience like myspace where a single wrong click breaks the audio. Also, not having popup player was a design decision that was made to give the website a more integrated feel.

We decided to completely removed flash from the UI equation and went full html/ajax because we found that it offered more flexibility and play with the page. The hardest part was figuring out a way to maintain state on each page load while keeping the audio continuous.

We went with an old-school frameset to create a type of inter-frame communication with the top level frameset acting as the orchestrator/bootstrapper. The visible "UI Controller" frame is completely blown out with the stateful player frame hidden from view.

The stateful player frame contains hidden swfs to handle playing audio and connecting to RTMP for our live streaming. All the communication in and out of flash is handled by a couple gateway javascript classes to abstract out the flash from the rest of the application.

Here's an example of a communication gateway for wrapping the events coming to and from flash. The event objects are native flash event objects that get sent by Flash's ExternalInterface and come in as JSON that can:

A single instance of this gateway is always maintained in the application which is called by a sort of simple container like this:

An instance of the gateway has to be maintained by the player application because events coming from flash have no context. This way the application classes can subscribe to events coming from flash like this:

At the core, audio is always played by Flash. The swfs broadcast events, such as audio head position and download progress of mp3s, and connection, streaming, meta data events from RTMP. Those events get passed on the instance of the hidden stateful player.

Since the server frame is only loaded once when the site first loads, an instance of the stateful server player is instantiated for the entire session on the site. On each client frame page load, the server player instance is "injected" into the visible client UI controller by the "bootstrapper" top frame. State is maintained in that instance which allows for the controller to query the state of that object and reestablish everything like which track is playing, progress, time, thumbs up or down status, shuffle, play mode (stream or individual mp3 and playlists), etc. Everything had to be covered like if an mp3 was in mid-load when someone browsed to a new page, the loading progress had to pickup on the next page. Here's a example of the bootstrapper code contained in the frameset: