It is an old post, but I will try to update it with a new information.
To use custom events you need to bind it to some DOM element and to trigger it. So you need to use
.on() method takes an event type and an event handling function as arguments. Optionally, it can also receive event-related data as its second argument, pushing the event handling function to the third argument. Any data that is passed will be available to the event handling function in the data property of the event object. The event handling function always receives the event object as its first argument.
and
.trigger() method takes an event type as its argument. Optionally, it can also take an array of values. These values will be passed to the event handling function as arguments after the event object.
The code looks like this:
$(document).on("getMsg", {
msg: "Hello to everyone",
time: new Date()
}, function(e, param) {
console.log( e.data.msg );
console.log( e.data.time );
console.log( param );
});
$( document ).trigger("getMsg", [ "Hello guys"] );
Nice explanation can be found here and here. Why exactly this can be useful? I found how to use it in this excellent explanation from twitter engineer.
P.S. In plain javascript you can do this with new CustomEvent, but beware of IE and Safari problems.