I have been playing with jQuery lately and I have gotten really fond of how much more one-to-one front end development has become. Earlier one had to do all kinds of tweaks to get things right, and the annoyance of that sort trial-and-error development have kept me away from doing anything really serious client side development. Sure, I've done many web applications but none with what the trendy Web 2.0 kids want today :o)

After poking around with jQuery I decided that I had to try and develop a plug-in. You know, not only using jQuery but also developing something that can be reused.

First a little history: Back in 2003 or something like that, my old time study friend and client side developer Kim, who I had a company with back in 1998-1999, handed over some client side code that my business partner at that time, Anders, and I could play with and use as we wanted. It was a nice little javascript snippent and some images which made up some client side functionality, that would show a little bubble with help text over for example an input box.

Anders and I made extensions of all the ASP.NET web controls, including the client side script and images. So, in essence, instead of using asp:textbox we used kwd:textbox, and could then write BubbleText = "whatever", and the user would get that shown. Pretty nice, and very welcomed by the end users of our applications.

So as I was playing around with jQuery I came to remember this client-side functionality and thought that it was a pity that it wasn't available on the more and more popular ASP.NET MVC platform. (Well, basically on any platform, but using it with ASP.NET MVC was my first concern). So I sat down and started investigating was needed to make a jquery plug-in.

The end result I have named BubbleHints. A bubblehint simply looks like this:

It's a standard jQuery plug-in with no ties to ASP.NET MVC and can be used on any web platform. Tested with Google Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Check out the examples.

Download examples, plug-in and images in a zipped package.

Feedback is welcome!