This Week in jQuery, Volume 4

So again, a slightly arbitrary list of discoveries related to jQuery this week.

Best jQuery Application

The Carsonified team released the beta of Twiggy , an application that searches Twitter, working as a widget in Opera for Nokia phones. Application widgets are built using HTML, CSS and Javascript, and stored / executed locally. Twiggy allows you to search Twitter and save bookmarks. Elliott Kember, together with Mike Kus, responsible for creating Twiggy, described their use of jQuery in the application:

Twiggy uses jQuery for all script animations and layout changes. Several small APIs are used to build the interface on the phone, but I also used jQuery a bit to interact with the user. I didn’t use overly complicated or tricky stuff due to a hard time limit, but I found that the animations performed by the phone are very good. It will be extremely interesting to design a much larger application, and reach the limits of the capabilities of the phones.

I used the jQuery Twitter plugin on tweet.seaofclouds.com , and it works great. I did not use jQuery UI - but I wonder how it will behave on such a limited platform.
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I chose jQuery because it is friendly, reliable and fast. I don't want to use assorted small libraries and functions that don't work as well. I was really surprised to find that N96, for example, works great with jQuery. I expected either the rendering engine to be slow, or to work with errors, or something else like that, but, fortunately, it worked fine with full jQuery 1.3.2 packed.

Upcoming conferences

Yehuda Katz and Brandon Aaron, guys from the jQuery project team, will introduce jQuery on Rails on May 4 at RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas.

jQuery game

A completely new game, jQuery Blackjack is now available on the jQuery Love website. The game uses jQuery, jQuery UI, and ThemeRoller theme.

Tutorials and blogs

• The Filament Group has published a great article on jQuery Menu: Dropdown, iPod Drilldown, and ARIA-enabled Flyout styles, ready for ThemeRoller .
• Benson Wong wrote an event-driven programming guide with jQuery .
• Rebecca Murphey discussed non-standard events in her tutorial. Non-standard events in jQuery open up possibilities for the formation of complex behavior .
• Barry Roodt showed 6 jQuery snippets, which you can use to manipulate select lists .
• Sam Dunn explained how to create rolling out blocks and tags using jQuery .

Plugins

• Diego A. has released an update to its Multiple File Upload plugin.
• Ralf Stoltze came up with another solution to the problem of queuing animations ( which Brandon described ) in the form of a new plug-in, hoverFlow .

- Do not forget to read about the events of this week in jQuery UI .