jQuery and its cousins are great, and by all means use them if it makes it easier to develop your application.
If you're developing a library on the other hand, please take a moment to consider if you actually need jQuery as a dependency. Maybe you can include a few lines of utility code, and forgo the requirement. If you're only targeting more modern browsers, you might not need anything more than what the browser ships with.
At the very least, make sure you know what jQuery is doing for you, and what it's not. Some developers believe that jQuery is protecting us from a great demon of browser incompatibility when, in truth, post-IE8, browsers are pretty easy to deal with on their own.

nanoScroller.js is a jQuery plugin that offers a simplistic way of implementing Mac OS X Lion-styled scrollbars for your website. It uses minimal HTML markup being .nano > .nano-content. The other scrollbar div elements .pane > .nano-slider are added during run time to prevent clutter in templating. The latest version utilizes native scrolling and works with the iPad, iPhone, and some Android Tablets.

The mobile-friendly, responsive, and lightweight jQuery date & time input picker.

Ultra lightweight, customizable, simple autocomplete widget with zero dependencies, built with modern standards for modern browsers. Because <datalist> still doesn’t cut it.

A jQuery plugin that uses CSS transitions to animate an element's height or width to or from auto.

Image loading seems to be something that’s either overlooked entirely, or handed off to unnecessarily large plugins. Having a beautiful, smooth and speedy loading experience for your site is a crucial part of good UX, and should be considered a common courtesy to your designer. After all, who wants to see their design spoiled by choppy line-by-line image loading every time they log on?

Earlier today I discovered an interesting way to keep (store) a CSS style on an element using CSS transitions. As far as CSS only solutions go, there are two other tricks that can be used to achieve this similar behavior: using either the :checked or the :target pseudo selectors. In this post, I’ll show you my CSS transition technique used above, followed by a slightly cooler example that I’ve been working on.

skrollr plugin for fullpage presentation decks

Why should I use this slider?

Fully responsive - will adapt to any device
Horizontal, vertical, and fade modes
Slides can contain images, video, or HTML content
Advanced touch / swipe support built-in
Uses CSS transitions for slide animation (native hardware acceleration!)
Full callback API and public methods
Small file size, fully themed, simple to implement
Browser support: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, iOS, Android, IE7+
Tons of configuration options

This is the first in a series of articles showing native JavaScript equivalents of common jQuery methods. While you might wish to wrap some of these in shorter alias-like functions, you certainly don’t need to create your own jQuery-like libraries.

jQuery plugin written by Jay Salvat. Full credits for the Face detection algorithm go to Liu Liu.

The result was SaveSelection.jsx, which saves a selection in a document, and RestoreSelection.jsx, which selects the same objects again, in the same order. It’s very simple to use—select a set of objects (in order, if necessary), then double-click SaveSelection.jsx). The script will display a dialog box where you can name the selection (or choose an existing selection to replace). If you’re creating a new saved selection, enter a name and click the OK button. If you’re replacing an existing saved selection, select its name from the dropdown menu (and do not enter any text in the New Selection field), then click the OK button. Either way, the selection will be saved in the document.

What if you want to open a menu item by script? For example the Configure plug-ins window. The solution is not on the surface: neither the InDesign Scripting Reference nor the InDesign Scripting Guide say anything about it.

However it is possible to achieve by invoking a menu action by ID. In our particular case we would use:

app.menuActions.itemByID(45313).invoke();

All InDesign scripts on this site are compatible with InDesign versions CS3 up to the latest version of CC.

The InDesign Scripting Forum is an ideal place to post scripting recipes and to address technical issues. I learn a lot from its famous contributors —Dave Saunders, Harbs, Jongware, Peter Kahrel, Kasyan Servetsky, Marijan Tompa… At odd times I post my own brainchilds. Here is a small selection of snippets and topics that I think are worthwhile.

Plunker is an online community for creating, collaborating on and sharing your web development ideas.

Prototype mobile apps with simple HTML, CSS, and JS components.

Web Inspector allow you debug Javascript right in the editor

This repo is the home for my research and documentation on Adobe Extendscript.