qTip: A jQuery Tooltip plugin

I’m working on a website project where I wanted to implement some tooltips. Normally, I don’t care for the things — I find them more a nuisance than anything else, or a shameless attempt at injecting a little whizbang — but in the particular case, I was willing to give them a shot. My JavaScript library of choice is the might jQuery, so I went looking for a plugin that I could drop into my site and quickly configure.

A quick Google search revealed several potential solutions, and I quickly latched onto SimpleTip. After all, I needed something simple and easy, so it sounded like the logical choice. After fiddling around with SimpleTip for a little while, though, I finally noticed that great big banner announcing qTip, SimpleTip’s successor.

In terms of features and functionality, qTip is on the other end of the spectrum. Among its features are customizable styles and positioning, visual effects, dynamic (read: AJAX) content (including a nifty translation method), and even multi-level tooltips (i.e., tooltips for tooltips) — check out the demos and documentation for examples.

At the same time, however, all of this functionality doesn’t come at the cost of simplicity or ease of use. qTip is very easy to install and configure, almost surprisingly so given all that it can do. In fact, it’s almost too easy: I’ve probably spent way too much time fiddling with qTip simply because it’s so easy to do some really cool things with it.