Last week I gave a presentation on creating interactive web experiences using jQuery at the Wharton UIConf/Higher Ed Web Symposium over at the University of Pennsylvania.
For the presentation I took a plain HTML student schedule form and added a bunch of interactive features: a floating modal dialog box, visual animations, dynamic event handling, and AJAX content refreshes and server posts. Then I walked through the core features of jQuery that make it an invaluable tool for developing web applications that are both interactive and maintainable.
The demo applications are available here:
http://uiconf10-jquery-app.heroku.com/
The slides are available here:
http://uiconf10-jquery.heroku.com/
I only had the chance to attend the first day of the conference. There was real energy in the crowd for putting serious thought into the design and experience of online content/apps. It was great to see so many people interested in learning and sharing, especially here in Philly.
On a side note — since my slides for the presentation were very code-heavy, I took a chance and used a Ruby presentation framework called Showoff. The chance paid off. Showoff turned out to be a huge time and effort saver in putting together the presentation content.