Creative Juices Bo. Co.

A JQuery Plugin That Gives Your Slide Shows Some Flash-Like Transitions

CJ Flashy Slide Show is a JQuery plugin that allows you to create a photo slide show that has some "flash-like" transitional effects. The plugin has various settings which you can manipulate to achieve a multitude of effects, such as sizing, timing, transparency and shape style. Integration is a snap, you basically create a set of images and wrap it within a simple container. Unlike most Flash solutions you do not need to create an external XML file or embed your images within a hard-to-change Flash project.

This version fixes various issues reported by users as well as incorporating a few new features. I've also rewrote the plug-in to incorporate a brand new framework which should be more compatible with other libraries.

A Quartz Composer Image Filter Composition to Add Sparkles to Your Image

Sparkly is an image filter to be used with Apple's Quartz Composer. If you don't know what Quartz Composer is, then don't worry. This is not the CJBoCo project you are looking for. But for those of you that are in the know, then here's a little present to brighten your day. I have been dabbling with Pixelmator trying to wean myself of all things Adobe. One of the features I like, is that Pixelmator allows you to use Quartz filters. One of the things I like about Quartz filters is that you can create your own. But alas, it seems as if the Pixelmator community is lacking in people making some of these filters available to the public. Well, not anymore.

A jQuery Session Time-Out Timer and Session Extender

Let's set up a problem I like to call the ColdFusion 30 Minute Session Limit monster. You have a secure back-end management page. It allows your client to edit a portion of their website content. One of the edit fields is using tinyMCE so the client can change an entire page worth of content. They start banging away at the keyboard, typing out what is sure to be the greatest webpage in the history of the internet. They take a phone call, talk for a bit and then jump right back to typing. It's truly awe inspiring. They finish and go down to click "submit". The form posts the data and BAM! Sorry, the session timed-out. Silly client, didn't you know you are on a shared ColdFusion hosting plan and the ISP has only given you a maximum of 30 minutes to do all your work!

No longer are you going to be bound to the maximum session time set by your ISP...

Yeah, admit it, we've all been there. I'm sure you took care of the problem by either telling them to type it in DreamWeaver first and then copy and paste it into the field, or maybe you're super talented and created some sort of time consuming coding trick to save the data for them. Either way, it's a pain in the ass. Well, no more. Again, I have worked countless hours in my secret underground programming lab and have come up with a solution that is sure to win me a Nobel prize. Maybe even a date with Jennifer Aniston. No longer are you going to be bound to the maximum session time set by your ISP, this plug-in gets around that limitation! Yeah, its that cool. OK, maybe not that cool.

A Simple jQuery Plug-In Template Demonstrating User Callable Methods and Per Object Storage Techniques

Using jQuery had been both exciting and exhilarating from day one. Ever since my first attempt at a plug-in, I've continiually been in awe of its power and ease of use. Unfortunately, I've also have my moments of frustration trying to figure out the best way to write them. A few of my earlier attempts failed rather spectacularly. I had problems when they were used with multiple objects, weird things were happening with methods and instances of my storage variables were bleeding across objects. It was a sad state of affairs.

Since those days, I have slowly found solutions to most of the problems and have been putting what I learned into a jQuery plug-in template that I have been using for most of my newer projects. I'm sure it's not perfect and to be honest there may be things I still need to learn. But I think its at a point that I can release it onto the world and step back and see what happens.

A JQuery Plug-In to Scale Objects to Fit or Fill Within Another Object

CJ Object Scaler will scale an object to either fit or fill within the boundaries of a destination object. I based this plug-in off another JavaScript project I made awhile back, you can read what it does in the CJ Image: Easily Calculate Image Scaling blog enry. It was a nice little function that would help you calculate the size and offsets to use when scaling an image to fit (or fill) within another element. It didn't actually do any scaling, per say, it merely provided you with the numeric amounts to use. The function introduced two scaling methods, Scale To Fit and Scale To Fill.