Unheap - A tidy repository of jQuery plugins

http://www.unheap.com/#

by shawndumas • 13 years ago

262 51 13 years ago

ajanuary• 13 years ago

It's slightly weird having such a snappy menu and then when you click something having a second of blank white while it loads the page.

posabsolute• 13 years ago

I must say, they do a great job at selecting plugins that goes into their repo.

diiiimaaaa• 13 years ago

It's really great that you draw a custom cover image for every single plugin.

Suggestion: make all navigation ajax-based and display the items right away (don't wait until all items are finished loading). This will make your site much-much more faster.

jscheel• 13 years ago

This is absolutely incredible. Thanks for putting together such an amazing resource!

prezjordan• 13 years ago

Thanks for listing me, guys! [0]. I bet I've gotten a ton of watchers from it.

[0] http://www.unheap.com/?s=dynamo

TallboyOne• 13 years ago

Here are even more. There are tons of hidden gems here that surprise me every day :)

http://pineapple.io/

ryderm• 13 years ago

Nice! Infinite scroll and sorting by github watchers would be useful too.

mourique• 13 years ago

yep, plus one for infinite scroll, i don't know why people would implement pagination any longer.

also, the form field of the search bar looked confusing to me. I would make it a little less subtle to find it easier.

kevincoughlin• 13 years ago

Very nicely done! Love the UI. Bookmarked it in hopes that it will help me find plugins for current projects.

criswell• 13 years ago

Bad ass! Did you do all the "thumbnails" yourself?

avalaunch2• 13 years ago

I'm curious about that too. They all have such a similar feel to them.

leetomblin• 13 years ago

All thumbnails were designed/made by one person, yep.

luciusism• 13 years ago

If they do freelance work, do you mind sharing?

swah3• 13 years ago

I was just thinking about this...

Suppose you're writing a web page with AngularJS.

Then you find out that you need a component that is very self-contained and of general use - let's say it is a WYSIWYG editor and let's pretend this thing doesn't exist yet (you will have to write it). Now the question:

Do you write it depending on AngularJS, or just JQuery?

vanni3• 13 years ago

According to the AngularJS Developer Guide [1]:

«Angular was built for the CRUD application in mind. (...) Games, and GUI editors are examples of very intensive and tricky DOM manipulation. These kinds of apps are different from CRUD apps, and as a result are not a good fit for Angular. In these cases using something closer to bare metal such as jQuery may be a better fit.»

[1] http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/overview#angularsweetspot

modarts• 13 years ago

I'd think Backbone plus jQuery makes more sense if you need close to the metal interaction, but still need some level of structure.

KaoruAoiShiho2• 13 years ago

I think you're missing the point of the question.

joesb• 13 years ago

I would prefer that a component depends only on jQuery but then provide an AngularJS directive to integrate that component into AngularJS.

swah3• 13 years ago

So its more or less like C: everyone wants to program on higher level languages, but everyone prefers that the libraries are written in ANSI C, so that every language can use them :)

KaoruAoiShiho2• 13 years ago

jQuery with an optional Angular directive in another git repo.

dracoli• 13 years ago

why this is so awesome!??? tell me! I suddenly found so many cool plugins.

darwindeeds• 13 years ago

Very nice work. Whats your tech stack like?

edwardunknown• 13 years ago

Another good one, though it hasn't been updated as much lately: http://www.functionn.in/

codegeek• 13 years ago

Great work. You just made my life so much easier. I have always wondered about finding good jquery plugins and imagined if we could find a repo like this. Here it is!! Did I say awesome ?

If you add a donate button, I will happily donate :)

jordanlev2• 13 years ago

Very cool. One question... how do I actually get to the project page for each of these? I can't find any kind of link anywhere. (Am I just supposed to google the name?)

tsigo• 13 years ago

Hover the plugin and a "Launch" button shows up. Might not be compatible with touch devices.

jordanlev2• 13 years ago

Doesn't work on Chrome/Mac (does work on Firefox though). Might be because I have cookies disabled on Chrome... but why would a link require that cookies be enabled?

wahnfrieden• 13 years ago

The entire image should be clickable, not just the little button that shows up.

rhubarbcustard• 13 years ago

I was chuffed that they considered my plugin good enough to add to their list (http://www.unheap.com/media/images/picstrips/). They add really nice illustrations for each plugin, the one for PicStrips is way better than anything on the actual Picstrips landing page! Don't know who does the illustrations but I would definitely consider hiring them in the future if they were available.

whomba42• 13 years ago

This is awesome! Only thing that I would -love- to see on this page is a filter so you can select browsers. My company still requires IE6 +up ("just tell your boss to not supp... " Yea, I know, shut the fuck up) so it would be exceedingly useful to strip out everything that won't work in IE6.

mnicole• 13 years ago

I love this resource, but my only problem is that some of the [beautiful] thumbnails portray the plugin better than the actually are. I'm not complaining about that, but the timeline one in particular was super janky in production but looked lovely in the image.

Not sure how feasible this would be, but what I'd be overjoyed to see is a way to push the resource over to something like Codepen.io (or something on Unheap's end) so you could tinker with it and have all of these spin-offs of people actually customizing the resource that Unheap could also link to. It'd act as additional inspiration, give people more of a reason to use the site, get more designers into code without the setup hassle, and help the plugin author better sell his/her skills as a developer vs. as a designer and likewise, better sell the designer as someone capable of working with code.

kanakiyajay2• 13 years ago

Then you might like http://jquer.in

pajju• 13 years ago

I think you missed his point.

He is asking to see the live demo link to be running on codepen.io. So there is more collaboration via forks, hacks.

Think: There can be more possibilities of using the same plugin via contributions and forks.

lowboy• 13 years ago

Great stuff, love the design and the icons.

I'd consider making all of the hover animations snappier (side menu, tooltips, etc). They look neat, but feel sluggish.

miles_matthias• 13 years ago

Gorgeous design!

dmazin• 13 years ago

This is great stuff but does it really need to render well on mobile?

btown• 13 years ago

Apparently one of the projects listed, Packery, is licensed under the MIT license for open source projects, and under an expensive commercial license for commercial projects. This makes my brain hurt. Isn't the whole point of the MIT license that it can be sublicensed without restriction? Then what's to stop someone from sublicensing the free version to themselves for commercial use?

http://packery.metafizzy.co/license.html

callmeed• 13 years ago

I'll admit the license issue is weird, but really–since when is $25 or $90 expensive?

I purchased the Isotope commercial license a few months back and I actually bought the Packery one today. I'm not really concerned with the nuances or semantics of the licensing.

csomar• 13 years ago

I'm not sure about the MIT, but I believe nothing stops them from doing that. It's like WordPress themes or plugins licensed under the GPL. Most of the time, you pay for support and additional features.

mnutt• 13 years ago

If you license under MIT but restrict who can use the software, it's not really MIT. MIT explicitly states that you may use the software "without restriction".

The GPL is even more stringent in that it doesn't allow you to further restrict the usage of others.

It's less about the cost and more about the fact that they don't understand open source licensing.

JonnieCache• 13 years ago

If you're using that lib for commercial purposes and you can't afford the $25/90 then you're Doing It Wrong™

nhm• 13 years ago

Looks great! What's the sort order?

Also, when clicking the tabs on the left the sub menu slides out and the page reloads shortly after. Perhaps it should only reload when you click the "All x" submenu item?

resu• 13 years ago

This is one of the most useful posts I've seen on HN. Thanks!

DodgyEggplant• 13 years ago

another good one http://iwantaneff.in/repo/

shaaaaawn• 13 years ago

This is a great tool. +1

kanakiyajay2• 13 years ago

Another similar resource to unheap >> http://jquer.in

Unheap - A tidy repository of jQuery plugins

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