jQuery In Action

In an attempt to sharpen up my jQuery, i purchased the book jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz. Reading through the book, i could see that the first few chapters were obviously aimed at beginners. They covered selectors (If you know CSS already your fine) and events. You can easily get this information off the jQuery doc site, nothing spectacular there. Chapter 5 covers the effects, slides and fades but goes into depth abit more on the animate function. Something (in my opinion) which is under documented on the jQuery doc site. It shows off a few different examples.

Chapter 7 is another excellent chapter - showing you how to write your own plugins. It goes into alot of detail, from extending the wrapper to proper naming conventions to looping through each element effected. This chapter is a must read for anyone considering writing their own jQuery plugins. Again, the authors have written 3 example plugins providing alot of reference material.

Fedora 9 Package Management

Fedora 9 includes the new package manager called Package Kit. It aims to be the package manager for your system, as it can install apts, slackware packages,rpms and many other file formats. I booted into it and noticed 2 things.

• The first, its incredibly slow - It took along time to download the updates i needed (Slower than downloading a normal file that size from the server) and it took along time to generate the meta data of plugins list.
• The second is that (in my opnion) the User Interface is horrible. Its hard to navigate to select the packages you want, When you select a package it takes a few more clicks to even see the dependencies it requires, whereas adept and synaptic show you right away.

I tried it, i can honestly say i gave it a good go, but its not for me. Since im new to the rpm system, i searched around for alternatives, i found one called Yum Extender (Yumex).  Its easy to install, just yum install yumex or download it from the websit.

Layout and UI Designer

A stumbled across an amazing online app, meant to be like a CAD im guessing but then i realised the different things it could be used for. Project Draw gives you a grid to start off with, you can then place various shapes onto the grid and resize them. Further more you can add colours, text, gradients, alignments and borders which makes it a really good tool to design layouts.

More jQuery Effects

With the arrival of jQuery UI 1.5 i was browsing its’ wiki pages and learning all of the API. I came across the jQuery UI wiki page, its essentially more jQuery effects except these ones are alot more dynamic! You can explode, puff, slide, highlight and alot more. I was a amazed that i hadn’t seen this page or been linked to it before, its something the jQuery UI team should be proud of.

Check it out

jQuery UI

For those of you with no jQuery background what-so-ever, jQuery UI is a series of user interface (UI) enhancements made in Javascript. These range from tabs (which also support ajax loading), to dialog boxes which you can drag, drop and resize. All cross browser! Although its currently still under development the finish line is in sight for the 1.5 release. I encourage everyone to check it out, it can add some really professional effects to your website for minimal lines of code.