jQuery

Learn how to use the powerful jQuery JavaScript library to create all sorts of useful scripts and nice effects.

jQuery Mobile 1.4: Cleaner, Faster and More Powerful

13 January 2014 / 2 Comments

jQuery Mobile is a great JavaScript framework that’s designed to help you build mobile web apps and mobile-friendly websites quickly and easily. The latest version, 1.4, came out last month, and it represents a big step forward for the framework.

In this article you’ll get an overview of the changes and improvements in 1.4, and learn how to apply some of these techniques to your own websites and web apps. You’ll look at:

The performance improvements in 1.4 that result in a smoother, faster experience for users
The new, simpler theming system
The new default theme and simplified swatches
1.4’s brand-new SVG-based icon set
The new flipswitch widget for smoother, more flexible flip switches
The filterable widget that lets you filter anything from listviews to tables and paragraphs of text
A new tabs widget for separating your page content into tabbed sections, and
A brief summary of the API changes and deprecations that are new to 1.4.

Let’s start with a quick look at how the jQuery Mobile team has improved performance in 1.4.

jQuery Mobile 1.3: What’s New?

1 March 2013 / Leave a Comment

jQuery Mobile is a handy JavaScript framework that makes it easy for you to build mobile web apps and mobile-friendly websites. jQuery Mobile 1.3 came out last week, and it has all sorts of lovely new features and improvements over 1.2. In this article you’ll get an overview of these changes, and see how to use jQuery Mobile 1.3 to enhance your websites and web apps even further.

You’ll look at:

Responsive web design improvements
Responsive grids
Two types of responsive tables for displaying data
A new panel widget
Improvements to range sliders and other form fields
A new navigate method and event for easy history manipulation
A new easy way to build autocomplete listviews
New options for dialogs and popups
Two new icons, as well as other icon improvements, and
A few miscellaneous enhancements to the framework and documentation.

We’ll start by taking a look at the concept of responsive web design, and see how jQuery Mobile 1.3 makes it easier than ever to build responsive webpages.

jQuery Mobile 1.1: Smoother, Faster, Nicer

16 April 2012 / Leave a Comment

The latest version of jQuery Mobile, 1.1, has just hit the streets, and it has some great new features and improvements over 1.0. In this article you’ll get a quick run-down of jQuery Mobile 1.1, and all that it has to offer you as a mobile web developer.

You’ll look at:

Improved fixed header and footer toolbars
Enhancements to page transitions, and two new transition effects
Loading spinner and text improvements
Cute mini form elements
Nicer-looking flip switches
Improved sliders
Disabling markup enhancements and Ajax handling for entire containers, and
A few other minor improvements in version 1.1.

At the end of the article, you’ll also get a brief taste of the new features and widgets that are slated for the upcoming jQuery Mobile 1.2 release.

Let’s start with one of jQuery Mobile 1.1’s headline features: its vastly improved fixed header and footer toolbars.

Ajax with jQuery: A Beginner’s Guide

6 March 2012 / 4 Comments

Many modern websites — and practically all web apps — use a technique called Ajax to provide a smooth, fast experience for the user. From apps like Gmail and Google Maps through to JavaScript frameworks like jQuery Mobile, Ajax is a popular way to fetch data from a server in the background and update the page dynamically.

Writing Ajax JavaScript code from the ground up can be fiddly. However, many JavaScript libraries, including jQuery, have excellent high-level support for Ajax, making it easy for you to build Ajax-driven websites and apps with minimal hassle.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn the basics of making Ajax requests using jQuery. You’ll look at:

Exactly what Ajax is, how it works, and why it’s a good thing
How to make various types of Ajax requests using jQuery
Sending data to the server along with an Ajax request
Handling the Ajax response from the server, and capturing any data returned in the response
How to customize jQuery’s Ajax handling and change default settings, and
A few links to some more advanced Ajax-related info and tips.

To keep things simple, this tutorial concentrates on the JavaScript side of things, rather than delving into server-side coding. However, it’s pretty easy to write server-side scripts that work with Ajax. If you want to learn a server-side language, check out my PHP tutorials.

Ready to learn Ajax? Let’s get started!

jQuery Mobile Masterclass: Build a Simple, Attractive Twitter App for iPhone

31 October 2011 / 2 Comments

View Demo »

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(Open on your iPhone or iPad!)

jQuery Mobile is a great framework for building mobile web apps, and as the 1.0 release gets nearer it’s really starting to mature into a stable platform.

In my previous jQuery Mobile article, I gave a quick overview of jQuery Mobile’s headline features. In this tutorial you’ll delve deeper into jQuery Mobile. You’ll build a simple, nice-looking, easy-to-use iPhone Twitter app called “CloseFriends” that displays your closest Twitter friends’ latest tweets.

You’ll explore the following topics as you work through the tutorial:

How to build a web app using just HTML, CSS and JavaScript (no server-side code).
Making an app that can be installed and launched from the iPhone home screen.
Creating rich mobile interfaces using jQuery Mobile, including page transitions, list views, buttons and dialogs.
Using Scott Jehl’s excellent pagination plugin to create a sequence of draggable “latest tweet” pages, much like the native iOS Weather app.
Tweaking the pagination plugin to create a nicer swipe experience.
Working with the Twitter API using JavaScript.
How to use HTML5 local storage to store data persistently in the browser.
Creating your own jQuery Mobile swatches to theme your app.
Working with jQuery Mobile events.
Adapting to different device screen sizes and orientations.
…and lots more!

You can try out the finished app on your iOS device by tapping the View Demo button above, and download the complete code and image files by clicking the Download Code button.

To get the most from this tutorial, it helps to have some familiarity with JavaScript, jQuery and jQuery Mobile. A great way to get up to speed quickly with jQuery Mobile is to read my comprehensive eBook, Master Mobile Web Apps with jQuery Mobile.

Ready to build the CloseFriends app? Let’s go!

Cover Flow Remade with CSS and jQuery

6 May 2011 / 10 Comments

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(Requires Safari)

If you’ve used a Mac or iTunes at all, you’ve probably come across the Cover Flow view. This shows you a series of album covers, photos, or other documents in 3D, allowing you to flip between them by clicking them, dragging a scrollbar, or using the arrow keys.

It’s a nice effect, but it requires a fair bit of processing power to accomplish. I thought it’d be a fun challenge to recreate it as closely as possible in a browser using CSS and JavaScript. At the start I had no idea if this was even possible, but I’m pretty happy with the result!

How to Make a Slick Ajax Contact Form with jQuery and PHP

1 April 2011 / 299 Comments

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Contact forms can be useful way for visitors to contact the owner of a site. They’re easy to use, and since they don’t expose the site owner’s email address in the page, they cut down on spam too.

However, contact forms can also be cumbersome, especially as they’re usually on a separate page. The visitor has to visit the contact form page, fill in the details, view yet another response page, and then try to make their way back to the page they were originally reading.

Fortunately, Ajax gives us a way round this problem. By embedding the form in the page, and submitting the form data via Ajax, the user never has to leave the current page. It also provides a smoother experience for the user.

In this tutorial we’ll build a nice-looking, embedded Ajax contact form that the user can summon up by clicking a link in the page. Along the way, we’ll explore various topics, including:

HTML5 form fields
How to use fallback techniques to make the form function even if the browser has JavaScript turned off
Using CSS techniques to create attractive forms
Writing a secure form mailer using PHP
Animating page elements with jQuery, and, of course…
Using jQuery to make Ajax requests

Before you begin, check out the finished product by clicking the View Demo button above. This opens a new page with some dummy content, and a couple of “Send us an email” links. Click one of these links to display the form.

The demo doesn’t actually send an email anywhere, but the finished code in the download is fully functional. To get the code, click the Download Code button above.

Ready? Let’s get started!

How to Make an Elegant Sliding Image Gallery with jQuery

16 March 2011 / 66 Comments

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There are a lot of jQuery image galleries out there, some of which are quite lovely (Galleria springs to mind). However, I’ve yet to discover a really nice-looking, full-window sliding image gallery that is simple and elegant, and that also shows off the photos to good effect. So I decided to write one!

To see what it looks like, click the View Demo button above. It looks best on WebKit browsers such as Safari and Chrome, but other modern browsers should work well too.

For best results, make your browser full-screen. Google Chrome gives the most immersive experience here — view the demo, then choose View > Enter Full Screen.

The gallery is simple to use. Click the left or right edge of the window to move around the pictures (or use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard). Hover over the main image to view its caption.

I’ve also made the gallery work reasonably well on touch devices such as iPhones and iPads by adding touch and swipe events. (I haven’t yet tested these on the Android browser so your mileage may vary there. Watch this space!)

So how do you make this gallery? In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the process step-by-step, from creating the markup and CSS through to writing the JavaScript code to make the gallery function. If you’d rather just grab the code and get going, click the Download Code button above.

If you like this gallery, please feel free to use the code in your own websites and projects. It’s Creative Commons licensed.

Ready? Let’s get started!

Drag-and-Drop with jQuery: Your Essential Guide

17 February 2011 / 128 Comments

Dragging and dropping can be a very intuitive way for users to interact with your site or web app. People often use drag-and-drop for things like:

Moving email messages into folders
Reordering lists of items
Moving objects in games around, such as cards and puzzle pieces

Drag-and-drop with JavaScript used to be very hard to do — in fact, getting a decent cross-browser version working was next to impossible. However, with modern browsers and a smattering of jQuery, drag-and-drop is now a piece of cake!

In this tutorial we’ll take a look at how to create drag-and-drop interfaces with jQuery, and we’ll finish with a complete drag-and-drop example: a simple number cards game for kids.

jQuery Mobile: What Can It Do for You?

5 November 2010 / 37 Comments

jQuery has long been a popular JavaScript library for creating rich interactive websites and web apps. However, since it was designed primarily for desktop browsers, it doesn’t have many features specifically designed for building mobile web apps.

jQuery Mobile is a new project that addresses this shortfall. It’s a framework built on top of jQuery that provides a range of user interface elements and features for you to use in your mobile apps.

The framework is pretty cutting-edge at the time of writing — in fact, the first alpha version was only released last month — but it’s already possible to do some great things with it.

In this article I’ll look at some of the key features and benefits of jQuery Mobile, and show some examples of how this new framework can help you build top-quality mobile apps in next to no time.

For best results, you’ll probably want to view the examples in this article with a mobile device such as iPhone or Android. Alternatively, Safari on the desktop (with a narrow window width) makes a good substitute.

Let’s go!

jQuery

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