jQuery UI: Notifying Users About Tabs

If you're using the jQuery UI tabs widget, it probably plays a major role in the layout of your UI. If it's the top-level navigation component, each tab panel probably has quite a few elements in it. Now, let's say the user is doing something in the third tab, but something important has happened in the first tab. You could just activate the first tab for them, but that's quite obnoxious. The better solution is give the user a subtle cue that something has happened in the first tab. The user then makes the decision for themselves, whether or not to drop what they're doing and activate the first tab.

jQuery UI: Highlight Selected Menu Item

The jQuery UI menu widget doesn't actually show the user which item they've clicked. It's helpful, however, if the user knows what they're looking at. Selecting a menu item will probably change the content elsewhere on the page, and the last thing clicked should give an indication of what we're looking at. With the select event, we can change the display state of the selected menu item.

jQuery UI: Highlighting Autocomplete Text

When a user types in an autocomplete text input field, the matching items are presented in a menu, just beneath the input. For example, the default autocomplete example uses an array of programming language strings as the source, so if you type "f", you'll get a menu displaying all items containing the letter "f" — doesn't matter where the "f" is located in the string, only that it's there. Sometimes, it's nice to see the matching portion of the item explicitly highlighted. Can we do this using the jQuery UI autocomplete widget?