Apple is known to create beautiful products (next to the needed functionality of course). I already wrote several articles on how you can transfer some amazing iPhone designs to your webbrowser, I own a MacBook Pro (which also looks pretty sleek) and many other products from Apple are well known for their amazing design.
The website from Apple isn't less: The layout is simple yet beautiful. Yet, one of the most awesome things about the website is the search functionality. It gives you suggestions (with images) about the several products they offer, making it really user-friendly.
Today, we're trying to recreate the effect from that website by creating a fancy apple.com-style search suggestion. Make sure you check out the demo (or visit Apple.com) to see this awesome effect work.
This example makes use of several techniques: MySQL (for the database), HTML/CSS for styling, PHP for retrieving the data and jQuery for the AJAX request. How about that for some nice way of combining powerful techniques to create something nice like this. You do need some basic knowledge about these techniques to fully understand this tutorial.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
As you can see, the demo is located on another server. The reason for this is, that every time a user presses on his keyboard, a call is made to the MySQL database. When loads of users do loads of calls (at the same time), this could result in slowing down the database. The answer for this would that the results should be cached - Something that isn't implemented right now.
Safari, Chrome and Opera are currently the only webbrowsers that support the drop shadow effect around the the search results. Other browsers will simply display the results without the drop shadow.
This technique would be great if it were converted to a plugin for a CMS (WordPress/Joomla/Drupal etc.), but also just very cool to have on your website.
Safari Demo
Check out this small video I placed on YouTube, showing this effect in full glory.
Want to learn how I created it? Check it out.
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