I'm such a jQuery nerd that I set my alarm and woke up early just to be one of the first to blog the good news. If you read my blog, you know I've been playing quite a bit with jQuery, and the jQuery UI project specifically. (Also note I've been blogging on InsideRIA as well.) The version I've been using, and was recommended to use, was the 1.6 Release Candidate. Well, you can remove the RC label now as the final, official release of the new version is here today.

Their blog entry covers the details completely, but at a high level, here is what you can expect.

• Fully compatible with jQuery 1.3.
• Updated plugins. (These are the plugins like progress bar, etc, that I've been blogging about with the RC.)
• CSS framework. (Ditto above. If you remember, it took me a little bit to get it working right, but once I understood the system, it was trivial to swap out different themes.)
• Offline documentation. (Hopefully they can make a snazzy AIR app like the core jQuery library has!)
• You can download all the themes at once. (Handy to make it quicker to test out the default themes.)
• A darn nice Getting Started guide.
• And more - again, please read the official blog release. Oh yeah, and they now have a blog: http://blog.jqueryui.com

I'm pretty excited about this. I've said before that sometimes the wealth of plugins can actually be a detriment to a new user. ("Ok, I need a tab control. What - I have to pick from 500 plugins???") So seeing the UI library mature like this really makes me feel more comfortable about jQuery UI as a whole. Congrats to the team.