BarackSlideshow – An elegant, lightweight slideshow script
This post discusses a project which has its own page. Please refer to BarackSlideshow for the most up-to-date information.
I guess pretty much everyone has seen Barack Obama’s website by now, which is clearly one of the prettiest of all candidates we’ve heard of so far. Not only is it an example of state-of-the-art design, but it’s also nice to navigate and interact with.
I decided to imitate the homepage slideshow. I had already experimented with similar animated lists, which allowed me to have it ready within minutes
The creation
I took my previous class (SlideList), and made a few changes here and there. It works with MooTools 1.2, and supports all kinds of shape transformations (top and left coordinates, and height and width properties), which means it can now be used with vertical, horizontal, or even irregular lists.
I extended it and came up with a new class that receives the images and loading spinner as parameters (note: it’s arguable whether this is the best decision OOP-wise, but due to the simplicity of this script, this was the right call)
The code
To ensure all images are loaded before the user makes any interaction, the MooTools Assets component is used.
The CSS plays a major role (as in every other animation-focused script). I suggest you analyze it carefully before implementing it in your applications or websites. You’ll probably need to adjust the ids, or use classes instead to keep your stylesheets clean.
The markup is meaningful and simple. Two lists are used (one for the images and the other for the links). The loading element is included in the HTML, but it’s probably better to inject it from the script directly.
The pictures
The beautiful pictures were taken from Flickr with permission of the owners, unless they were directly released for non-commercial use. Thanks vgm8383, dogonnit, M. TANIGUCHI, GustavoBuriola & others!
The demo
Click here to see it in action or go to the project page for download and other details.
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When I try installing someone’s work, I usually place everything EXACTLY as it arrives onto my site until I can make it work as intended. In that way there’s no question about paths, filenames, and so forth. This slideshow, unfortunately, seems to be hit and miss for most people who’ve written here despite their best efforts. There has to be something fundamentally wrong with the instructions since so many report the same issue, that is, the absence of transition and images open in a new window. I gave this four hours of my time. Now on the back burner unless Mr. Rauch can point us to the secret of his success or to some hidden instructions that will clarify the mystery.