Recently I was working on some projects which required some advanced techniques. Sometimes you should stop thinking how to make it with HTML and CSS, and just to do it with good JavaScript code.

So far, all of these plug-ins were forced because of design decisions, but anyway important here is the plug-ins and the great job which they doing. So:

jScrollPane

jScrollPane is a jquery plug-in which allows you to replace the browsers default vertical scroll bars on any block level element with an overflow:auto style. You can easily control the appearance of the custom scroll bars using simple CSS.

I have use it because the designer decided to show the content in a size of business card, and the client of course wanted to provide as many information as he could. If course this one could be done with single line of code: overflow: scroll; in the css definition, but this way you cannot control the appearance of the scroll bar, so from the design point of view it was unacceptable.

Anyway, the plug-in is really rich of features, and really easy to be used. It requires some other plug-ins, for full capacity, but it is good.

jQuery pager plug-in

It’s a plug-in which transform long pages into paged area. To be fair, this is what the client wanted as interface – paged content based on paragraphs. Unfortunately the content includes also the bullet lists which are problematic with it. The plug-in provide ability to set up the appearance, i.e. putting your own labels on the pager links and height of the area.

Dimensions

This plug-in give the ability to know the width, height and position of an element in the page. I’ve wrote about it in my previous post, and although it’s not used in the new design it’s really handy.

Silky smooth marquee

In the same project I was asked to implement a news ticker /who uses such things these days, anyway :)/. So, standard marquee tag was, just ok, but it is not smooth enough. This plug-in does exactly this – making the scroll smooth and the text more readable.

and the last but not least

jQuery validation plug-in

As the name says this plug-in provide a form validation. The good thing is that it’s “validate as you type”. So it could mark field as invalid instantly when you insert more than required chars or enter an invalid email.

Well, not a rocket science, but at least they are helpful 🙂 Hope this post helps someone.