I'm pleased to introduce Unleashed Technologies' first open-source project, "maxchars"!  maxchars is a jQuery plugin for easily adding and enforcing character limits on input elements with a friendly UI.  It works similar to Twitter, where users are presented with a helpful message stating the number of remaining characters or notifying them if they've exceeded the limit.  Similar plugins already exist, but we wanted to design something far simpler and easy to integrate.

Exactly one year ago, John Resig and the jQuery team released version 1.3. This release came packed with feature upgrades, such as the new ultra-fast Sizzle selector engine, live event bindings, and more. Development has been rather quiet since then, leading many to speculate that nothing major was going on - boy were they wrong!