jQuery continues to be a VIP in my development world. I’ve covered some must have jQuery plugins before and they are all still going strong. Three new plugins have been released recently and I think they will each bring an important GUI element to your web application.

ListNav

[From the site]
We’d always wanted to have a javascript-based control that we could easily apply to long lists of items to allow quickly navigating around the list. Since most lists are alphabetically sorted, we came up with a plugin that allowed us to have a long list and then, by binding the list to our jQuery listnav plugin, an alphabet-based navigation bar would magically appear above the list, showing all of the letters from A to Z. Clicking on a letter dynamically filters the list, so you can, for example, click on C and the list changes on-the-fly to show you only items beginning with C.

[My impression]
It is fast and I can’t believe it took so long for someone to do this. It is very natural and easy to use.

ContextMenu
[From the site]
This is a jQuery plugin to create context (right-click) menus. The primary use for this is for web applications rather than the general web.

[My impression]
I’ve tried a couple of context menus in the past, but this one is the most flexible in usage and design.

jCrop

[From the site]
Jcrop is the quick and easy way to add image cropping functionality to your web application. It combines the ease-of-use of a typical jQuery plugin with a powerful cross-platform DHTML cropping engine that is faithful to familiar desktop graphics applications.

[My impression]
Very smooth and easy to use. One of the better image cropping plugins.

/etc/

Rick Strahl over at West Wind has written up a great introduction to jQuery. Rick got into jQuery with ASP.NET early and it is paying off. If you follow jQuery closely, you probably heard that Nokia and Microsoft are both adopting jQuery as their javascript framework. That kind of mainstream acceptance is great for jQuery and kudos to the jQuery team.