JavaScript can add a lot of special effects that can really improve the user’s experience. Here are 10 simple and clever JavaScript techniques that add an extra dose of usability to any website.

Apple is one of the coolest brand names in technology, so no wonder their site should adhere to modern web design standards. Divs, classes, no tables, media types, ajax libraries, separated stylesheets, extensive code organization, interesting varying layouts, it’s all there for you to learn from.

Turns a selected element into a ‘window’, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way. [via]

Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. Ten recent developments in the field of user experience design are presented here. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but some of them are already reality and in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous in the next years.

“The Web has a particular architecture and it makes sense that if you are deploying a service or API on the Web then it should take advantage of this architecture instead of fighting against it. There are millions of deployed clients, servers and intermediaries that support REST and it makes sense to be compatible with their expectations.” [via]

Creating tabbed interfaces suddenly becomes a piece-of-cake when using the Tabs function in the jQuery UI library. It can be utilized to create completely unique interfaces without having to be a coding God - using only one line of code!

A free, open-source tracking environment for FTIR-based multitouch tables. It has been written for Mac OS X Leopard and uses many of its core technologies, such as QuickTime, Core Animation, Core Image and the Accelerate framework, but also high-quality open-source libraries such as libdc1394 and OpenCV, in order to achieve good tracking performance. [via]

An experimental sort of game, with a tangible interface that touches the field of mixed reality. The game features a self-willed heroine who is trying to get from the very left to the very right of the screen without touching the bottom and dying. However there is nothing she can stand and jump on so she needs the player to help her. The player has two small wooden blocks, in each hand one. Pressed on the screen they are being recognised by the game and the heroine can jump on them. To make the game even more challenging there are hazardous flower-like enemies who try to destroy the heroine when she comes too close.