This Week in jQuery, vol. 4

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Here again is my somewhat arbitrary list of jQuery-related sightings on the web this week.

Featured jQuery App

The folks at Carsonified have just released a beta of Twiggy, an app that searches Twitter from Nokia’s widget-enabled phones Opera as a widget. Widget apps are built in HTML, CSS and Javascript, and are stored and executed locally. Twiggy lets you search Twitter and save favorites.
Elliott Kember, who along with Mike Kus is responsible for creating Twiggy, describes their use of jQuery in the app:

Twiggy uses jQuery for all the Javascript animations and layout changes. There are a few small widget-only APIs that interface with the phone, but I’ve used jQuery for the user interaction bits. I didn’t end up using anything very complex or tricky due to the limited time frame, but I found that the phone handled animations really well. It’d be very interesting to design a much bigger app and take the phone to its limits.

I used a Twitter jQuery plugin from http://tweet.seaofclouds.com/ and it worked just fine. I didn’t use jQuery UI – but I’d be interested to see whether it worked on such a limited platform.

I chose to use jQuery because it’s familiar, reliable and fast. I didn’t want to use custom little libraries and functions which might not work so well. I was really pleased to find that the N96, for one, runs jQuery really well in this runtime. I half-expected the rendering engine to be slow, or buggy, and shoe-horned into the phone somehow, but it’s quite happily running a full, packed jQuery 1.3.2.

Upcoming Conference

jQuery Project Team members Yehuda Katz and Brandon Aaron will be presenting jQuery on Rails on May 4 at RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas.

jQuery Game

A brand new game, jQuery Blackjack is now available on a brand new site, jQuery Love. The game uses jQuery, jQuery UI, and a ThemeRoller theme.

Tutorials and Blog Entries

• The Filament Group just posted a terrific article, jQuery Menu: Dropdown, iPod Drilldown, and Flyout styles with ARIA Support and ThemeRoller Ready
• Benson Wong has written an Event Driven Programming with jQuery Tutorial
• Rebecca Murphey discusses custom events in her tutorial, Custom events in jQuery open doors to complex behaviors
• Barry Roodt shows 6 jQuery snippets you can use to manipulate select inputs.
• Sam Dunn explains how to create Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery

Plugins

• Diego A. has released an update to his Multiple File Upload Plugin
• Ralf Stoltze has come up with another solution to the problem of animation queue buildup (which Brandon Aaron describes here) in the form of a new plugin, hoverFlow.

Don’t forget to check out This Week in jQuery UI.