In this, the last post in my series on jQuery, I mention an odd lot of interesting things about jQuery that are worth knowing. Some involve specific code; others aid understanding of jQuery’s philosophy. You may or may not want to also read these earlier posts on jQuery:

1. \[intlink id="110" type="post"\]Incorporating jQuery into an HTML page \[/intlink\]
2. \[intlink id="248" type="post"\]Selecting page elements \[/intlink\]
3. \[intlink id="261" type="post"\]Adding event handlers \[/intlink\]
4. \[intlink id="298" type="post"\]Applying effects \[/intlink\]
5. \[intlink id="300" type="post"\]Manipulating elements \[/intlink\]
6. \[intlink id="302" type="post"\]Ajax \[/intlink\]
7. \[intlink id="312" type="post"\]Plug-ins \[/intlink\]

I StumbledUpon this page that lists 21 Lesser-Known Open-Source Applications for Windows. As a person that prefers to use open-source software and tries to avoid using Windows, I was intrigued by the listing. As the article points out, many people are already using open-source and cross platform software like the Firefox Web browser, Thunderbird email client, GIMP image manipulation software, OpenOffice Microsoft Office alternative, and the VLC video player. (Although, as an aside, while I do use Firefox as my primary browser, and often use VLC, I’ve never really thought that GIMP or OpenOffice were really comparable to the commercial alternatives.) The author does a good job of highlighting a mix of things, from utilities to multimedia to games. I expect I’ll try out ZScreen for my next book, as I always need to take screenshots on Windows (while testing code). If I used Windows regularly, I expect I’d love Launchy, as I love QuickSilver on my Mac. Being able to start applications without moving over to the mouse is such a timesaver. I also do use Filezilla on Windows, and recommend it in my books, as a good, free FTP application.

In this, Part 7 of my (consistently delayed) series on the jQuery JavaScript framework, I talk about plug-ins you can use to expand jQuery’s features. You may want to read some of the previous six parts before getting into this one:

1. \[intlink id="110" type="post"\]Incorporating jQuery into an HTML page \[/intlink\]
2. \[intlink id="248" type="post"\]Selecting page elements \[/intlink\]
3. \[intlink id="261" type="post"\]Adding event handlers \[/intlink\]
4. \[intlink id="298" type="post"\]Applying effects \[/intlink\]
5. \[intlink id="300" type="post"\]Manipulating elements \[/intlink\]
6. \[intlink id="302" type="post"\]Ajax \[/intlink\]

An article I wrote for Peachpit Press titled Using an Encrypted Local Database in Adobe AIR was just published at Peachpit’s Web site. In this article I discuss and demonstrate a feature added to Adobe AIR in version 1.5. This addition allows you to securely store data in a database on the client’s computer (previous versions of AIR supported both databases and encrypted local storage, but not encrypted local databases).

I stumbled upon this article titled 10 Rare HTML Tags You Really Should Know. The content’s as you would expect it to be. Unfortunately the benefit of using a couple of the tags isn’t clear, but I do like the information on OPTGROUP and ACRONYM. Although do not that the indicated code for OPTGROUP is incorrect. OPTGROUP tags should actually wrap around the options that go within that group:

<select name="os"> <option>Select Your OS</option>
  <optgroup label="Windows">
    <option value="Vista">Vista</option>
    <option value="XP">XP</option>
  </optgroup>
  <optgroup label="Mac">
    <option value="Leopard">Leopard</option>
    <option value="Tiger">Tiger</option>
  </optgroup>
</select>

Select Your OSVistaXPLeopardTigerI would like to think that the LABEL and FIELDSET tags are being used regularly, but perhaps they aren’t. As for WBR, I’d never heard of that one, but it’s quite interesting.

An article I wrote for Peachpit Press titled Building AIR Application Menus with the MenuBuilder Framework was just published at Peachpit’s Web site. In this article I discuss how the MenuBuilder JavaScript framework can be used to easily turn an XML file into an AIR application’s menus.