jQuery plugins July 2010

InputNotes

A jQuery plugin to add notes below textareas and input fields based on regex patterns. Great for validating forms and showing additional info.

Equal Column Heights

This jQuery plugin sets the height of selected elements equal to the height of the highest element with the ability to animate the change.

Full Calendar

FullCalendar is a jQuery plugin that provides a full-sized, drag & drop calendar like the one below. It uses AJAX to fetch events on-the-fly for each month and is easily configured to use your own feed format.

Button Tutorials

A nice compilation of some of the helpful tutorials that can teach you on how to use jQuery in improve and creating special effects for the buttons of your website.

Poshy Tip

A new promising tool tip with a lot of options for configuration and easy to use. It also works very well with forms.

Thumbnails Navigation Gallery

Extraordinary navigation using images, a great tutorial by codrops, definetely worth checking out.

jQuery.Spritely

A plugin for creating dynamic character and background animation in pure HTML and JavaScript. It's a simple, light-weight plugin with a few simple methods for creating animated sprites and dynamic scrolling backgrounds.

and for the iPhone and iPad experts: jQuery Swipe

Renaming Networking Printers in Windows

I had never realized that you are not able to rename network printers, but it is sad and true. There is however a work-around which allows to rename network printers indirectly.

Instead of adding your printer as a network printer, add it as a local printer with a new port. In the new port specify your network printer share, eg. \\printer-server\printer-share-name. After selecting the model/etc, you have a network printer which feels like a local printer, which you can rename.

Thanks cobolhacker for sharing this info.

Firefox 3.6.4

Yesterday I have updated to the latest version of Firefox, version 3.6.4 and actually I am amazed. I have been using Chrome for a while because of it's speed compared to Firefox. I must say that the latest version of Firefox now starts up almost as quickly as Chrome and the respond time is also superb, especially if you compare how many add-ons I have installed.

I looked at the memory usage and this has also become better, actually even with the large amount of add-ons Firefox uses around the same amoung of memory (on a fresh start) as Chrome.


I did have a same issue with our network/proxy. I know our company proxy needs authentication and I have always been struggling to get non microsoft applications to work. It loaded some pages and some it just would not load... crazy... after investigation of http traffic I got denied errors. The fix was easy:

Navigate to
about:config ->
network.automatic-ntlm-auth.allow-proxies -> true
network.negotiate-auth.allow-proxies -> false

Details at mozillazine.org

Great job for the Mozilla team!

Getting rid of Content Preparation Progress dialog in Reader 9

Since I have installed the latest version of Reader (9), each time I open Adobe Reader, it start scanning the document with a message: Please wait while document is being prepared for ....

This is really annoying, Reader is not the fastest and things like this makes it even slower.

Fix: Goto to the c:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\plug_ins\ folder (or the folder where you have installed Reader) and remove the Accessibility.api file.

Is IE gonna die....?

I was reading an article about the upcoming promised IE 9: http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/03/microsoft-to-double-down-on-html5-with-internet-explorer-9/

As it is clear, Microsoft is running behind the facts and not setting the standards anymore (regarding browser technology). If Microsoft will not keep up with the technology, IE will die, because people will drop it in favor of faster and better browsers.

Currently I think more and more people are using a non IE browser at their personal hardware, due to different reasons. The one and only place where IE still rules is the corporate/business hardware. Personally this is one the reasons why IE has still a big market share. As mentioned in my previous posts, business software eventually follows what people use at home (matter of being used to....). Loosing market share on personal/home computers will hurt IE very hard...eventually, as it will take some time, but it will happen.
Maybe it will happen even faster, as more and more web developers in corporate operations, are actually using Chrome and Firefox during development. Users/testers will be aware of this and they would like to have the same speed and functionality as the developers. As more business solutions are converted/created as web applications this can have a big impact and would be able to speed up the process of killing IE in the business environment.

To conclude, if Microsoft does not take real action and just tries to keep up with the developments, their browser will die. (It even feels like this time Microsoft is the WordPerfect/Lotus123 they have killed years ago)

EU funding

See article at fsteurope.com. Nothing surprising actually: Germany and France are the biggest payers int the EU for the EU. Actually there is something surprising, the Netherlands. As suspected and now confirmed, the dutch people are the biggest contributors for the EU (followed by Denmark I think).

Maybe I should move to Luxembourg..

Sharepoint Filter List from url

Sometime you need to a have a link to filtered list in Sharepoint. Luckily Sharepoint has the ability to do this. You need to use the following parameters after the list url:

......allitems.aspx?Filtername=<name of field>&FilterMultiValue=<filter text>


<name of the field> is the field name in your list, you wish to filter on (eg. Name etc)
<filter text> is the filter criteria. You can use * as an wildcard. You can add multiple filter text values by separating them with semi colons.

For example:


......allitems.aspx?Filtername=Name&FilterMultiValue=A*;B*

will show all items starting where the Name starts with A or B.

I like this method because it allows you to have multiple values and wildcards. You could also use the FilterField1 and FilterValue1 parameters. (see for more info: Using URL to sort or filter a list).