Animation in web applications can do more than add pizazz to a page, it can give good visual cues to the user as to what is happening.
For example, consider an image carousel, where you have one largish image and smaller ones in the background.
Having images animate to get larger and move into place (in addition to sliding on and off the screen) lets the user confirm the intended image is being shown.
There are several methods you can use to create odd/even stripes for lists to make them easier to scan. A List Apart had an article about creating stripes, but being over five years old, it understandably doesn’t cover some newer techniques which are available. Then again, the need to support legacy browsers makes the article more relevant than you would think at first.
Web applications for Mobile Safari (used on the iPhone and iPod touch) can take advantage of multiple touches and gestures. The simplest gestures to implement are scaling and rotating an object, since support for them is built-in.
With many web applications becoming more dependent on JavaScript, much work is being put into improving JavaScript performance. Even though Google’s Chrome uses WebKit (the same engine as Safari), they’re using a different JavaScript engine named V8. Mozilla will be using TraceMonkey in Firefox 3.1, and Safari will be using SquirrelFish Extreme.
All these engines compile down to native code. How much does this affect performance? Taking WebKit as an example, the original SquirrelFish is about 50% faster than Safari 3.1’s JavaScript engine (already 3x the speed of Safari 3.0). Adding native code compilation, as well as other speedups (including a regular expression just-in-time compiler) makes SquirrelFish Extreme more than twice as fast as SquirrelFish.
The engines are playing leap frog, and all seem to be in very active development, so I find it very interesting to follow. I’ve found that SquirrelFish (Moderate, haven’t tried Extreme) works quite well, and I’ve played a few minutes with Chrome and found that to work well, too.
Exciting times in the JavaScript world.
