Continua la rassegna, direi infinita delle risorse per jQuery sotto forma di plugin; nei precedenti post abbiamo visto utilità davvero interessanti, ma oggi vi propongo delle vere primizie che sembrano davvero spingere la creatività in una direzione pratica e innovativa.

jQuery.popeye 2.0 is released! It is an advanced image gallery script built on the JavaScript library jQuery. Use it to save space when displaying a collection of images and offer your users a nice and elegant way to show a big version of your images without leaving the page flow. takes a different approach: not only allows it for browsing all thumbnails as well as the large images in a single image space, it also repects the page flow and stays anchored and rooted in the webpage at all times, thus giving a less disruptive user experience than modal windows. Galleria is a javascript image gallery written in jQuery. It loads the images one by one from an unordered list and displays thumbnails when each image is loaded. It will create thumbnails for you if you choose so, scaled or unscaled, centered and cropped inside a fixed thumbnail box defined by CSS. The core of Galleria lies in it’s smart preloading behaviour, snappiness and the fresh absence of obtrusive design elements. Use it as a foundation for your custom styled image gallery.

ThickBox is a webpage UI dialog widget written in JavaScript on top of the jQuery library. Its function is to show a single image, multiple images, inline content, iframed content, or content served through AJAX in a hybrid modal. A modal window is a child window which requires the user to interact with it before they can return to operating the parent application. Modal windows are commonly used in GUI systems to absorb user awareness and to display emergency states.

LightWindow is the most powerful modal window I have seen so far. It has so many features, you have the complete ability to style and position it. It is very easy to implement as well. Lastly, most moal window application didn’t actually test for their media types and how they behaved in other browsers and operating systems. However, LightWindow has done a great job, other than images, inline content, iframe content and ajax content, it also supports Quicktime Movie, SWF and PDF.

jCoverflip is a jQuery plugin for easily creating coverflow-like interfaces that can display images or any other content. The content can be browsed by simply clicking on any of the items or using a slider (jQuery UI slider). It is possible to define the number of items to be displayed and the animation speed of transitions.

Feature Carousel is jQuery Plugin that is primarily meant to display featured stories with carousel effect on your home page. It provides a unique alternative to commonly used content sliders; displaying three images at a time, with remaining images hidden behind the selected item.

Cloud Carousel is a jQuery plugin enabling you to create 3D carousel with features like auto-reflections and integration with Slimbox image viewer plugin. It also supports captions with “alt” and “title” attributes in the image tags. Cloud Carousel is a cross browser plugin that works in all major web browsers including IE6.

Waterwheel Carousel is a jQuery plugin that you can use to display images with a cascading waterfall effect. It can be positioned either horizontally or vertically, and custom events can fired when an image moves into the center or clicked. It is a cross browser plugin that works in all major web browsers including IE6.