jQuery

Build Responsive Sites Quickly with Foundation

31 July 2012 / 5 Comments

Responsive design is a big topic these days. A website with a responsive layout adapts to different devices — from widescreen desktops down to mobile phones — by resizing and rearranging the content in the page, as well as showing or hiding content.

While a basic responsive layout isn’t too hard to create, things can get fiddly once your layout starts getting more complex. On top of that, there are cross-browser issues to deal with, as well as setting up nice defaults for typography, colours, buttons, forms, menus, and so on.

This is where frameworks like Foundation come in. Foundation takes care of a lot of the “grunt work” involved in setting up a new site, with a responsive grid, cross-browser CSS, and good-looking default settings for all sorts of page elements.

In this introduction to Foundation, you’ll get an overview of Foundation’s features, and see how you can use the framework to rapidly prototype and build your next website. Enjoy!

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!

Cover Flow Remade with CSS and jQuery

6 May 2011 / 10 Comments

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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.

25 Web Tech Buzzwords Demystified

9 September 2010 / 5 Comments

The web is a fast-moving industry, and it seems as if a new web technology buzzword emerges every time you blink. From Ajax to WOFF, the array of buzzwords — and the technologies behind them — can be quite bewildering at times.

How are you, dear web developer, to keep up with it all?!

In this article I list 25 key web buzzwords that every modern web developer should understand. For each buzzword, I explain its meaning, talk about why the technology is useful, and include a few links for further reading.

Enjoy!

Create Smooth Rotatable Images with CSS3 and jQuery

25 August 2010 / 19 Comments

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With the advent of CSS3 transforms, we can do some nice tricks with elements in a web page, including rotation, scaling, and skewing. Once we start throwing jQuery into the mix too, we can start doing some really nice tricks!

In this tutorial I’ll show how you can use CSS3 transforms, along with some jQuery, to add smoothly rotatable photos to a web page. You can try it out right now by clicking the “View Demo” button above. Hold down Shift, then click and drag on a photo to rotate it.

I’ve based the code on this photo light table tutorial that I wrote a couple of months ago. In that tutorial, you could drag photos around the table, and click a photo to view it in a lightbox. Now, with this latest addition, you can also Shift-drag a photo to rotate it smoothly about its centre. Nice!

I should point out that this tutorial won’t work in IE at all, since IE (as of version 8) doesn’t support CSS transforms. I suspect it might work in IE9, although I don’t have it to test with. It also won’t work in touchscreen mobile browsers (yet) due to the lack of a Shift key!

Here’s how to code this baby up. Bear in mind that we’re starting with the script from the last tutorial, so if you want to follow along then you can download that code and work from it.

A Snazzy Animated Pie Chart with HTML5 and jQuery

11 August 2010 / 84 Comments

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In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to build a lovely, interactive pie chart using the latest HTML5 technologies. Not that long ago, this kind of thing was only practical to do with Flash. Now, thanks to advances such as the HTML5 canvas element, we can create pretty nifty animated effects using nothing but JavaScript, CSS, and a small sprinkling of maths!

Kitchen Table: Adding a Lightbox

1 July 2010 / Leave a Comment

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In Kitchen Table: A Slick Photo Light Table Using CSS3 and jQuery, we created a nice-looking “light table” of draggable photos. This is a fun, novel way to display a handful of images in an image gallery. However it would be nice if the user could click a photo to enlarge it.

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to enhance the light table by adding a lightbox to display a bigger version of a photo when it’s clicked. You’ll also display a caption for the image within the lightbox.

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