Okay. I’m going to do something a bit unsual today. I’ve been in love with AJAX ever since I came across it two years ago, simply because (in my opinion) it makes the web more fun to play with.

The D-tech Blog team unanimously decided to introduce a new category to the blog, exclusively dedicated to AJAX and Adobe AIR® applications. YIPEE!!

I saw this really cool post at NetTuts+ on 20 really amazing AJAX effects and after checking them out, I was really impressed. Though most aren’t really AJAX, they still provide quite amazing functionality.

Let me quickly run you through my top 5 out of the lot. Enjoy;

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1. Image Menu

Image Menu 2.2 is a really impressive script which creates a horizontal menu using a couple of images. Each time you move your mouse over any image, it reveals more of that image. This amazing JavaScript resource was developed by Samuel Birch

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2. Image Flow

Image Flow an unobtrusive and “user friendly” JavaScript image gallery script featuring a scroll-bar which allows users seamlessly browse through the images. It kinda reminds me of what the guys over at XING used for their Guided Tour (which leaves me open-mouthed each time I must add).

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3. Search Field CSS/JS

SearchField is a simple light-weight Auto-Suggest script which guides the user by providing hints to assist them find what they are looking for as they type. It’s actually one of my personal favourites because of the ease of configuration.

Actually, I am a bit biased in favour of this because I found it just about the same time I was battling with a similar thing on one of my projects

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4. jQuery checkbox

jQuery checkbox adds a little flair to checkbox fields in forms. It adds a toggle button very similar to that of the iPhone interface, giving a very distinctive on or off. It’s great for usability, and the dynamic skin can be turned on or off, on the fly.

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5. Control Tabs

Last but by no means least, Control Tabs is a “sweet script” that gives many different ways to configure tabs on a page. It attaches/creates a tabbed interface from an unordered list of links/anchors that point to any elements on your page that have an id attribute.

Since it attaches these behaviors to HTML that already has semantic meaning, it will degrade gracefully for browsers that do not support JavaScript, and is search engine friendly. It attaches in one line of code for simple use cases, but is highly customizable and can be used in a variety of edge cases.

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Quite amazing, I’m sure you’d agree.

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