Lately I have come across a whole bunch of useful jQuery plugins, and thought I would share them with you all here. It is amazing to see the versatility of jQuery inspiring creativity – for plugins that have a real use for web developers. While some of these plugins will not suit everyone’s needs, they do have their own special purpose – a purpose to help make web development faster and simpler, while assisting web developers to provide meaningful web user experiences.
jquery.adaptive-backgrounds.js
A simple jQuery plugin to extract the dominant color of an image and apply it to the background of its parent element.
tabulous.js
Tabulous.js can be used with any contents you choose in the tabs and it couldn’t be more simpler to use.
floatlabels.js
The Float Label Pattern found his success after Brad Frost wrote a blog post about Float Label Patterns. The idea is based on a Dribbble Shot by Matt D Smith. The Pattern is easy to explain. On User Interaction with an input field the placeholder value moves up, and is displayed above the typed text. This Plugin offers you the possibility to upgrade your forms with this famous pattern.
SVG Avatars Generator
This jQuery integrated script (with some PHP files on a server side) lets your visitors to create custom avatars. The Avatars Generator is based on SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic), which is supported by all modern browsers and does not depend on screen resolutions. As a result your visitors can download their avatars as SVG file or as PNG one (2 size options) which is converted from vector graphic parts. The integration of the SVG Avatars creator is quite simple too. This script has responsive interface and doesn’t use any usual images, like JPGs or PNGs (except for downloading), only vectors, which give us clean and perfect look on any devices including Retina.
Video Chat
Magnoliyan Video Chat (mgVideoChat) is full featured video communication system with integrated text chat, available directly within your web browser. You can consider it as online web based Skype, but without the requirement to install any additional software, plugin nor flash.
There is unlimited number of use cases: online live video chat support, private rooms, community chat rooms…
Headroom.js
Headroom.js is a lightweight, high-performance JS widget (with no dependencies!) that allows you to react to the user’s scroll. The header on this site is a living example, it slides out of view when scrolling down and slides back in when scrolling up.
Words Rotator jQuery plugin
Words Rotator is a lightweight and customizable jQuery plugin for rotating text and some words of your text with awesome CSS3 animations.
Vanillabox
Vanillabox is a simple, modern Lightbox-like plugin for jQuery. You can easily setup your image gallery with this plugin.
jGallery
jGallery is a jquery plugin that will allow you to easily add a beautiful gallery to your website or blog.
jQuery Resize End Plugin
A tiny plugin to handle events after a (window) resize has been completed.
The “jQuery Resize End Plugin” reminds me on the debounced resize from Louis-Rémi Babé (https://github.com/louisremi/jquery-smartresize) which seems to be a little smaller and cleaner written.