Monday, December 12, 2011

6 Free jQuery Tooltip Plugins


6 Free jQuery Tooltip Plugins
By: Keith

There’s no question in learn a web design that including tooltips in your web design helps in making your website more user-friendly. They’ve been proven to be very helpful to the user especially when it comes to filling out online forms, particularly in keying in acceptable data formats in text fields and choosing the correct option button or check box.

Thanks to jQuery, not only have web developers managed to make these bland yet helpful popup boxes or squares a little more appealing to the eye but  also more functional.

Below are six nice and cleverly designed jQuery tooltips that you can use on your website, and the best thing about them is they’re all FREE! Some of them activate with the usual mouse hover while some with mouse clicks; simply pick whatever suits your fancy.

Easiest Tooltip and Image Preview Using jQuery

Our first jQuery plugin’s name says it all. This script is so short and simple, it hurts! Best of all, it can be applied for a variety of purposes. Below are 3 examples of using the same very, very simple script. Demo1, Demo2, Demo3




Coda Popup Bubble

Coda is one of the new web development tools for the Mac , and it’s very popular with some web designers and developers. Panic (the developers of Coda) has a rep ‘sharp’ design.





jQuery Image Tooltips
It displays a tooltip image when the user hovers on the thumbnail with fade in and out effect.






jGrowl
jGrowl is a jQuery plugin that raises unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X's Growl Framework works. Click on the name above or the image below to see and appreciate the code in action.





Sticky Tooltip

This tooltip follows the cursor around as it moves about within the element. What’s unique about this tooltip is that it can be "stickied", or kept visible on the screen through the right-clicking of the mouse over the element or simply by pressing the "s" key. 

This is very useful when the user wishes to interact with some content within the tooltip, like clicking on a link inside it. The contents for each tooltip are very easy to define and customize as they are simply defined as regular HTML on the page.



Digg-style Post Sharing Tooltip

Now here’s a very cool and interesting tooltip plugin whose design is said to be similar to that of the one found in Digg.com. It’s a tooltip box that contains share links to various social media sites!
Although similar in appearance, the way it works is different with Digg's. If you view Digg’s HTML source code, it has the sharebox HTML code in every single post. But in this tutorial we have only one sharebox, and all the links share the same template.



Hope you guys find these plugins very useful on your sites. Have fun experimenting with them!

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