Using jQuery custom events to organize code better
lhorie.blogspot.com
lhorie.blogspot.com
If you're using this technique a lot then you should probably consider a Pub/Sub library though. Pub/Sub will essentially give you the same functionality (and a similar API) as custom events but the performance of most Pub/Sub libraries is an order of magnitude (or greater) faster than jQuery custom events.
a) jQuery has custom events out-of-the-box and code that uses them looks pretty idiomatic (as far as jQuery goes anyways)
b) I find that when it comes to fancy complex UIs, the events aren't usually the bottleneck, so I'm not sure why performance optimization for them should be a primary design concern (i.e. to the point of considering including/maintaining one more library).