10 of the Latest jQuery Plugins

Here are 10 of the latest jQuery plugins to come out. They include everything from sliders to tooltips to HTML5 uploaders.

WOW Slider: jQuery Image Slider & Carousel

WOW Slider is a jQuery image slider with stunning visual effects (Blast, Fly, Blinds,Squares, Slices, Basic, Fade, Ken Burns, Stack, Stack vertical and Basic linear) and tons of professionally made templates. WOW Slider is packed with a point-and-click wizard to create fantastic sliders in a matter of seconds without coding and image editing.

FitText: jQuery Flexible Font Size Plugin

FitText makes font-sizes flexible. Use this plugin on your fluid or responsive layout to achieve scalable headlines that fill the width of a parent element.

Tipped: jQuery Tooltip Plugin

Tipped allows you to easily create beautiful tooltips using the jQuery Javascript library.

Evolved from the popular Prototip library, Tipped takes tooltips to the next level by using HTML5 to give you full control over the look and feel of your tooltips.

Flux Slider: jQuery Slider with CSS3 Transitions

Flux slider is a CSS3 animation based image transition framework, inspired in part by the fantastic Nivo Slider jQuery plugin.

Instead of the traditional Javascript timer based animations used by jQuery, Flux utilises the newer, more powerful CSS3 animation technology. Its in a fairly early/rough state at the moment but testing on the iPhone/iPad does appear to produce much smoother animations. Desktop performance (as with Nivo) is very smooth but the use of CSS3 enables us to produce some new effects that Nivo can’t, e.g. rotations.

The aim is to use hardware acceleration where possible to improve performance on less powerful devices, such as mobiles & tablets.

jQuery Chop Slider

jQuery Chop Slider is the awesome animated jQuery slider that comes with unlimited transition effects. Chop Slider uses full power of CSS3 animation. It has own CSS3 support detection and works a little bit different (but still awesome) in old (and Internet Explorer) browsers. It allows you to be fuly creative and create your own transition effects.

jQuery HTML5 Uploader

jQuery HTML5 Uploader is a lightweight jQuery plugin that lets you to quickly add an upload system a-la-Gmail into your web app.
You only need to create a dropbox element (i.e. a div) and jQuery HTML5 Uploader will do the rest. Then you can drag & drop one or more files on the element and the files will be uploaded.

It also works with the multiple input file element.

The upload function is divided into two asynchronous operations: client side, the file is loaded in the browser memory with aFileReader object. Useful if you want, for example, to show the image preview while uploading a picture. The server side operation consists in sending the binary file string to the postUrl (see settings).

Elastislide: Responsive jQuery Carousel

Elastislide is a responsive jQuery carousel that will adapt its size and its behavior in order to work on any screen size. Inserting the carousel’s structure into a container with a fluid width will also make the carousel fluid.

In a carousel, one could think that simply making its container “shorter” will solve the problem on smaller screens, but in some cases (e.g. when we have bigger images) it might be reasonable to resize the items as well. This and other options are part of Elastislide’s properties.

Elastislide uses the jQuery Touchwipe Plugin which allows you to obtain the wipe event on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

Automatic Image Montage jQuery Plugin

Arranging images in a montage like fashion can be a challenging task when considering certain constraints, like the window size when using fullscreen, the right image number to fill all the available space or also the size of the images in use. The Automatic Image Montage plugin allows you to automatically create a montage, either for a liquid container or a fixed size container (including fullscreen), with the option to fill all the gaps.

FitVid: Fluid Width Video Embeds

A lightweight, easy-to-use jQuery plugin for fluid width video embeds.

FitVids automates the Intrinsic Ratio Method by Thierry Koblentz to achieve fluid width videos in your responsive web design.

Dropkick: Beautiful Dropdown Menus with jQuery

Creating custom dropdowns is usually a tedious process that requires a ton of extra setup time. Oftentimes lacking conveniences that native dropdowns have such as keyboard navigation. DropKick removes the tedium and lets you focus on making s@#t look good.