jQuery ContentHover Plugin

January 16th, 2012 - Frontend, jQuery - No Comments

ContentHover is a small jQuery plugin that helps you show some hidden content on top of an element when the mouse hovers over it. There are options to chose how your hover effect would appear, like fade in or slide in from any direction, you can change the opacity of the overlay etc.

Textualizer – A jQuery plugin to transition through blurbs of text

January 10th, 2012 - Frontend, jQuery - No Comments

Textualizer is a jQuery plugin that allows to transition through blurbs of text. Textualizer currently has the following effects: fadeIn, slideLeft, slideTop, and random. You can choose which effect to use by setting the effect option.

DropKick.js Painless custom dropdowns

October 26th, 2011 - Frontend, jQuery - No Comments

A really useful jQuery script if you want to replace the default form dropdowns. Very easy to customize it as well. As the author states:

“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.”

Make your select boxes better with the Chosen plug-in.

July 23rd, 2011 - Frontend, jQuery, MooTools - No Comments

The Harvest team brings us something really cool, a plug-in for jQuery and Mootools that improves the overall look and UX of your select boxes.

It comes with options for auto-filtering results, painless multi-select and much more.

How to make a custom music Equalizer with jQuery

July 1st, 2011 - Frontend, Javascript, jQuery - 1 Comments

Music on websites is kind of a deprecated concept nowadays, but for those clients who absolutely must have it or or that funky web radio station that needs a custom player, there is no reason not to follow the latest standards using HTML5 and JavaScript. In this micro tutorial we ‘ll see how we can implement a simple pseudo-equalizer in our player of choice using just CSS and jQuery.

The HTML

The markup is straightforward, just a simple container with a new element for each of our bars.

<div class="eq">
    <span class="bar"></span>
    <span class="bar"></span>
    <span class="bar"></span>
    <span class="bar"></span>
    <span class="bar"></span>
</div>

Styling our bars

We can now use whatever styling we need to make the equalizer up to par with our player and website. I chose to use a simple green color for demonstration purposes:

.bar {
    background-color: green;
    width:7px;
    height:15px;
    display: inline-block;
    vertical-align: bottom;
}

The important thing here to notice is the vertical-align: bottom; rule. Without it, the equalizer animation behaves a bit peculiar. This forces each bar to animate starting from the top, instead of the bottom.

The jQuery

function fluctuate(bar) {
    var hgt = Math.random() * 10;
    hgt += 1;
    var t = hgt * 30;

    bar.animate({
        height: hgt
    }, t, function() {
        fluctuate($(this));
    });
}

$(".bar").each(function(i) {
    fluctuate($(this));
});

What this does, is to create a random number which will be used to randomly determine the height of each equalizer bar each time we loop through the function.

We then use the .animate() method of jQuery to begin animating the height of each element randomly. Pretty easy, right?

Let’s delve into this code a bit more:

var hgt = Math.random() * 10; hgt += 1;
Creates a random number of 0 to 10. This will be used as the new height of each element, each time the function loops through itself. If we need a taller, or shorter bar, we can change the maximum height by simply adjusting the “10″ value after Math.random().

var t = hgt * 30;
Gets the current height value and multiplies it by a number. This is a little trick to keep the speed with which each bar fluctuates random. If you want something faster or slower, simply adjust that number.

bar.animate({
height: hgt
}, t, function() {
fluctuate($(this));
});
Here we animate the height of our bar, in the random time of t, and then we call the same function again so it loops through itself over and over again.

$(".bar").each(function(i) {
fluctuate($(this));
});
Finally, we iterate this function over every single .bar element.

And there we have it, our own custom jQuery and CSS equalizer! Feel free to use it on your own website if you need to.