However, there’s a distinct point of failure of jQuery UI – ThemeRoller. ThemeRoller is the tool that’s used to create a jQuery UI theme – without a theme, there’s a lot less to love about jQuery UI. None of the widgets and CSS styling are available (interactions and effects would still be available, though). This past week, though, ThemeRoller was down. Specifically, it was not outputting custom themes, though the default ones were working. It was down for about three days, to be exact. This was a very big deal to me (amongst others, I’m certain) – I had to delay a production release because I couldn’t get a custom theme that I needed at the time.

There are a lot of reasons that ThemeRoller would be down, and it’s understandable that it will probably break at times as updates are made to it. The bad thing is that if ThemeRoller goes down, for whatever reason, there is no alternative available to create themes with. What I would like to see happen is there be established an alternate home for ThemeRoller. In addition, it should have an archive of all production versions of ThemeRoller. That way, if a bum version gets released for a few days, one can always use the previous version, which should work fine.

With these fairly trivial changes, jQuery UI would eliminate a point of failure. What could possibly be better than that?

I’ve just released my latest plugin, the jQuery UI Image Carousel! The plugin is a standard-fare image carousel, and it’s also fully compatible with jQuery UI. It’s got a few options that make it fairly versatile – from a minimal look all the way to a collapsible version with a custom header.

The JavaScript itself wasn’t that daunting – version 1.0 clocks in at around 180 lines. Most of it is presentation management as well – making sure that the correct jQuery UI classes are applied to the markup, and so forth. In total, it was a bit of a longer exercise – there was a lot of work to insure compatibility with older versions of IE, for instance. I hope you enjoy, and if you use it, please take a sec to leave a comment with your page URL.

<a href="blah..." onclick="return DoAction();">Link</a>

...

function DoAction() { /*Do Something */ return false; };

However, there’s a better way, using the event.preventDefault() method. I had the need to use this recently, when I was fixing a trivial issue with the Filament Group jQuery UI buttons – my ‘a href’ styled buttons were still clickable when they were disabled. An easy solution to this problem is to capture the click and prevent the default action. I hooked this action to all disabled buttons, as such.

$(".ui-state-disabled").click(function(event) { event.preventDefault(); });

This code isn’t that robust – if you were to add or remove the ui-state-disabled class after page load (which I didn’t have to), you’d want to make sure to handle it appropriately. Either way, preventDefault() is definitely an elegant solution to disabling a click action.

I’ve created my first jQuery plugin this week – it’s an image overlay plugin (the static pic above doesn’t do the plugin justice, so click through to see it in action).

Creating a jQuery plugin isn’t that big a stretch for a competent JavaScript developer. There are quite a few tutorials out there where you can grab a template and start working very quickly. In addition to writing my plugin, I also made sure that it supported the metadata plugin, so that you can dynamically change properties on individual galleries and images, which should go a long way towards usefulness.

If you end up using this plugin, drop a line in the comments with a link so we can check out your work. Hope you enjoy!

I’ve been focusing a lot lately on demonstrating some CSS animation techniques. That’s all fine and well, but there is definitely a need for some instructional material on the web. To that end, check out this CSS animation tutorial that I just finished. It will teach you some techniques that are useful today in a mixed-support world for CSS animations. All the examples covered are progressive animations that require little work on your part, and that also don’t significantly impact user experience if they are unable to view them.

I wrote the demo using straight HTML and jQuery UI instead of the normal blogging platform. To that end, there’s no support for comments on the tutorial so feel free to comment here if you’re interested. Enjoy!

I’ve been working on some demonstrations on how to combine jQuery UI and CSS animations for some pretty neat effects.

Not to pimp my other businesses too much or anything, but check out blaq design if you want to see an eCommerce site done up with jQuery UI as well.