Let me start by saying I have read plenty of questions and blog posts relating to the use of combinations of backbone/jQuery mobile and comparisons of backbone/Sencha, and have actually had my head in this space for some time but still haven't found quite what I'm looking for.
I'm very familiar with Sencha and have used it for wrapped (phonegap etc.) apps in the past, and I really like it. However for a smaller code base for web projects and more control over browser compatibility and various other reasons it's not quite appropriate for certain tasks.
When I start trying to engineer mobile (but also desktop and tablet) backbone webapps from scratch I find I miss three key things
General mobile 'init', filling the screen etc. (although this is the easiest to replicate)
Tabbed, iOS-style, navigation (of course I can roll my own, but it seems silly)
Scrolling - both scrolling a piece of content, but especially the carousel and how the carousel is linked to the tabbed interface
I'm not massively bothered about mimicking each device's native OS style throughout the app, and in fact would prefer to (whilst following some sensible conventions) make them look a bit different.
Ember has flame and I've used that before, that's kind of the thing I'm looking for.
I know I can build up a toolkit of jQuery mobile, custom script, jQ plugins/iSroll, CSS libraries, backbone UI etc. and do like the idea of compiling my own 'stack' but for some reason it just doesn't feel right.
So, to bring this back around to more of an actual question. I guess I'm looking for ideally a single project that isn't specifically linked to a library - and in theory could run on it's own on a statically coded page if needs be (even though that wouldn't be the case for me now). Or perhaps some words from others who have been on a similar journey and perhaps ended up on the mix of libraries I mentioned earlier with why they decided this was the best solution.
I'm not looking to do anything too crazy, say something a bit like the old sencha oreilly example but using some carousels, and I'd cover the multiple devices and browsers with a mix of Responsive CSS and a bit of JS.
I'm going to continue looking at this myself too and report back if I find anything interesting
Cheers
EDIT
While looking into this, I realised its only really the carousel and scrolling that I really wanted from Sencha. I noticed that Cubiq has a nice slideview component that handles the carousel very neatly and with a small footprint. I found a stackoverflow answer about using this with the original iscroll for vertical scrolling. See my answer below for successfully using the two together
How to use iScroll4 with SwipeView?
This would need some tweaking to work appropriately on desktop. and I'd like to control it from a tabbed UI too. Anyway, I'm not near answering my own question but given this has had a couple of upvotes I'd post some of my thinking.
Quick edit
You can attach events for tabs to the slideview https://dl.dropbox.com/u/81328343/scroll/1.html but at the moment, it only animates for next/prev and not direct page (tab) access
Webix
Very big library of components.
I've used Twitter Boostrap with Backbone...
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
Related
I am trying to find a very neat, very stable alternative to the <marquee> element that supports both CSS and AngularJS. So far, I have incorporated jQuery-WebTicker (found here) which does work quite nicely but has a few flaws which is making my website look a little unprofessional (no disrespect, but I'm not sure if they're still providing support).
I also came across an Angular example (found here) but to be honest it's a little complicated for my new javascript skills so far. I need it to scroll left to right mainly and be configurable.
I am using a service to pull in an RSS feed from a News site and display all headlines in a continuous loop. I also need to be able to update the marquee with new content every 5 minutes or so. And it would be preferable if I could update the marquee at the end of the loop, so the content doesn't jump whilst someone is reading it.
Does anyone know of a good alternative, or could assist me in creating my own (maybe streamlined from the Angular demonstration mentioned above)?
I have looked at a 'lot' of jQuery demos but nothing seems to work 100%. Most of them don't seem to maintain consistency when scrolling large arrays of text.
I'm developing a website for someone who requested a dynamic sliding page when you scroll (i.e. like this). At first I was thinking it was something I could use CSS transitions for, but then I realized there might be a JS tool out there which could make it work.
I discovered this page of dynamic movement examples with an associated library on github, but I'm not quite sure how to make it work. Basically, I'd like the page to listen for the event of a scroll, and then slide up a section of the page in the same way as the example above. When looking through the code for the dynamic movement examples, it seems like it's a a bunch of cases in the JS file that get used somehow in the event of a button press.
Please, if anyone is familiar with building something like this, please let me know how it might be done.
I would encourage you to make use of fullPage.js.
It is nowadays the most popular library for single scrolling pages. It has plenty of options, methods and callbacks and you can almost do whatever you think of with it.
Compatible with old browsers, kinetic scrolling (Apple laptops) and touch devices.
I'm trying to create a page similar to new google calendar landing page http://www.google.com/landing/calendar/
I'm using skrollr(https://github.com/Prinzhorn/skrollr) but I can't get the effect right, on google landing page if you do a small scroll it will send you to the next block and with skrollr I'm not able to get that navigation. Any ideas how I could reproduce that? is it possible to do with skrollr or you would recommend another js plugin?
Thanks!
In case you still haven't found a solution yourself, I've been tasked with doing a very similar thing. There are two ways of achieving this that I researched and choosing the right one mostly depends on the complexity of your design/expected result. Unfortunately I can't provide a link because the site won't be live for next couple of weeks.
This is what worked for me:
I used fullpage.js library to achieve 'full-page' scroll effect. You could also take a look at onepage-scroll.js and see which one fits you most - they don't differ that much in terms of functionality though.
Benefits of using fullpage.js (among other things):
integration is quick and simple
allows a lot of customisation through options hash
provides callbacks when scroll to another section is triggered (before or after it happens)
enables you to manually trigger a scroll via 'methods'
works surprisingly good on iPad/iPhones. Probably on other mobile devices as well, although I can't fully confirm that since that
wasn't a requirement for my project.
Now when you've got section-to-section scrolling in place, what's missing is the animations. Considering that fullpage.js provides you with callbacks, it's as easy as adding a class when a transition to another section/slide happens and then using that class to trigger an animation of your choice through CSS. This is what worked for me without facing major problems.
For more advanced things:
If you're looking to build something more complex, then I strongly recommend that you take a look at tween.js. This is what google used on the landing page that you've provided in your question.
It's a very powerful tool hence it requires quite some setup + it moves animations to javascript, which might be a hassle. I would rather keep them in CSS where they belong and dont use javascript until I really need to.
FYI I also started with skrollr but it won't really work with 'fullpage scroll' because what it really does is disabling scrolling and animating body/html through translate. Skrollr bases it's behaviour on scroll event which will not fire if you use libraries I proposed.
EDIT:
It appears that you can actually use skrollr in par with fullpage.js. You can see the answer on how in it's FAQ site. Thanks to Alvaro for claryfing that! Even then, I wouldn't use skrollr unless you really need it for some advanced parallax scrolling effect - as said before, depends on your needs though. :)
Let me know if you have any doubts or something is not clear in my answer.
Good luck!
This is probably a trivial question, but I feel like it would be useful toward web design. I really like the style of some of the Rainmeter widgets and I wanted to know if there was any way to maybe incorporate them into a website. To be honest, I don't really care for its practical purposes, otherwise I would have gone with the usual widgets you can find on the web which were developed for websites. I am more worried about its aesthetics, and frankly... The widgets I've seen for the web are not the easiest on the eyes (Maybe you know a place where there are some beautiful widgets). Perhaps this is no longer even a widget in a sense, but just an image. An animated image. Surely there is a way though to incorporate the resources you find for Rainmeter onto a website. I tried to answer it myself, and so far only came up with this: create the image on a photo editing program, and then animate it on the website (could be tricky). Perhaps there is a way to edit a widget's style? So my question is really, how would you create/incorporate the widgets you find in the Rainmeter libraries? For example, to recreate what you see on the link below. (With animation).
http://customize.org/rainmeter/skins/67189
Thanks!
You are probably searching for the wrong keywords. You should be looking for charts and/ or gauges and maybe graphs. The most examples/ libraries will be found including the keyword "javascript" or "css" and now "html5"
This will probably never have a concrete answer, as it seems new browsers introduce new inconsistencies in the way the process or integrate html standards. I've noticed this especially with JavaScript animation. The browsers that support them tend to be more consistent in the way they display CSS transformations. I, personally, haven't delved too much into HTML5 canvas, but that will most likely be the way to go in the near future.
Alternatively, search for dashboard themes.
I'm working on a web app that I want to operate more like a standard OS app. It is similar in layout to iTunes where I have a top header, a menubar beneath it, and then a left-sidebar and a main content area. The goal is that everything stays where it's at on the screen and only the main section scrolls (because it has a grid/table of content).
I can accomplish this by using absolute positioning, adding overflows, specifying top/left/top/bottom, and automatic scrolling when applicable. However, I'm not sure this is the best approach. I did some research here on SO and the web and didn't find a conclusive answer.
I know it works, but is it a valid or acceptable approach? My goal is to get it working but working using proper standards and acceptable approaches.
I could use a Javascript framework that accomplishes this as well (extjs, some jquery libraries, etc) but I think they do the same thing, they just do it dynamically at page load instead of specifying it up front.
CSS has pretty lousy support for web application-style UI layout. There are promising specifications on the way, like css3-grids and css3-flexbox. But the browser support is lacking, especially the css3-grid.
When I implement a web app today, position: absolute, seems like the least worst option. It's flexible enough and meets most of the requirements.
There is a good blog post that talks more about this: http://blog.stevensanderson.com/2011/10/05/full-height-app-layouts-a-css-trick-to-make-it-easier/
Honestly, if it works it works, if it doesn't it doesn't. Standards, best practices, etc. are great and all, but only inasmuch as they help you to accomplish the actual goal. An app that's done the "wrong way" but is up-and-running is infinitely better than the "properly" built app that will be built eventually, once everybody's figured out what exactly the proper way is. That said, it sounds like your approach makes complete sense.