The Mitchies. Rating the Best GUI Plugins My interface is an example of what a novice non programmer can do using jQuery and a number of its best plugins.
The goal was to build a GUI that contained a large number of web 2.0 features, meaning controls that gave a desktop experience inside the browser. Besides wanting to upgrade my very popular avian search engine (http://www.whatbird.com), I wanted to see how far I could go, how many controls could I use to make my GUI inviting and modern. I also wanted to see how such a GUI would work in the various browsers, such as IE and FF. I wanted to see how fragile javascirpted web 2.0 pages were. I stumbled upon jQuery and instantly saw its value. Then I dived in. The resulting project was an inspiration to me because of how much I could accomplish with so little code. I had to become familiar with a large number of topics that were very technical, but I had a lot of hand holding and help from thejQuery community. Below I have listed the plugins I have used in the whatbird GUI. Three stand out. I have given links to these so you can go get the plugin and try it. But you can see how it works right here by just going to the tab above calledSearch. I decided to give each plugin my own "mitchie" which is essentially my own plugin rating from 1 to 5 like the kind you see on Amazon. The winners are cycle from Mike Alsup, tabs by Klaus Hartl and accordian by John Resig. You can see the details and winners here: http://www.whatbird.com/wwwroot/Components/Complete_Search_Tab.html Thanks Mike, Klaus and Dan. Mitch
