Skrollr - parallax scrolling for the masses

simonsarris 14 years ago |

It's a neat demo of some very nice capabilities, but let us please not go back to the Flash era circa 2002 where designers tried to make their navigation as nauseating as possible.

Or put another way, its worth remembering that just because you can incorporate all of these effects does not mean you should. Some designs can be very disorienting to some people.

patrickaljord 14 years ago | |

Let us please not have this kind of comments on HN _every_ single time a css3 animation demo makes it to the front page...

mobweb 14 years ago | |

It would be kind of a boring demo if they just showed some very subtle and barely noticeable effects. ;)

mediocregopher 14 years ago | | |

I think he wasn't referring to the demo itself, which obviously should show off as many nauseating effects as it has, but to future devs who might use this library.

obtu 14 years ago | | |

Encouraging its use “for the masses” has me worried.

ericcholis 14 years ago | |

"Just because you can use a hammer doesn't mean you can build a house"

You're right, the dreaded Flash sites of four years ago haunt me every day. However, I've seen some outstanding designs using these techniques. They were outstanding because they were done by professional interface designers. Put these tools in the right hands, and you'll get amazing results.

Corun 14 years ago |

This is very cool and all, but I just see it as another example of a web tech demo that if rewritten for my 20 year old Super Nintendo would run with more frames per second. There appears to be no hope in the near future for smooth interaction on the web. WebGL can do the smooth web - But then it's not the web, it's just javascript+opengl.

pharrington 14 years ago | |

Your SNES would absolutely choke if it tried to output at higher resolution than 512x448 interlaced. Hell, plenty of games had considerable slowdown with less objects on screen than this demo had. Hyperbole doesn't get us anywhere.

Also, without profiling, it's hard to say if the slight choppiness is due to the library itself not being optimized, the browser rendering engine not being optimized, a combination of such, or other factors.

parkov 14 years ago |

Here's a nice demo of a similar library called Scrollorama: http://johnpolacek.github.com/scrollorama/

Skrollr is noteworthy because it's significantly smaller (5.5kb vs. 94kb+jQuery), and makes use of HTML5 data attributes for notation.

obtu 14 years ago | |

Also, strictly for parallax, here is jQuery.parallax which has a much classier demo: http://stephband.info/jparallax/

ryanwhitney 14 years ago |

Feels like scrolling with weights on my fingers.

some1else 14 years ago |

It seems that the main demo is a bit too busy for Chrome.

I had similar issues trying to spice up a presentation website with transitions and animations. The simpler examples[x] seem to be working much better.

In my experience, Firefox and Chrome tend to perform very flakey when CSS3 transitions/animations are in question. It's like a random performance profile is chosen every time the document loads. More often than not, the second time to load the transitions/animations work great, as if the browser performed some CSS JIT, but performance often drops again on consecutive loads.

I hope these features mature performance-wise, so we can start using them in meaningful ways (and also survive the 2001-style abominations that are bound to happen). I think it's sensible to use requestAnimationFrame[r] to determine if the animations aren't performing well, and disable them accordingly.

[x]: https://github.com/Prinzhorn/skrollr/tree/master/examples#ex...

[r]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.requestAnimation...

imperialWicket 14 years ago |

I think if this is used with appropriate limitations and caution, it can add to a site's presence in a positive way. All the UI concerns already listed are definitely valid, though - it's easy to take this too far.

There are quite a few decent parallax scripts/libs out there, but most of them rely on scrolling (like Skrollr) or cursor position tracking (github's 404 page). Am I the only one who likes to be able to page through parallax with buttons?

duncanbojangles 14 years ago |

Brilliant demo! I did think this was going to be about old school side scrolling games, though, but I was not disappointed!

mitjak 14 years ago | |

If you liked it check out the Transformer Prime page:

http://eee.asus.com/eeepad/transformer-prime/features/

It starts off with a typical terrible "people you would never see use an Asus product" photo and quickly gets very cool.

dsmithn 14 years ago | | |

Here's another well done one: http://www.nintendo.com.au/gamesites/mariokartwii/#snes

graue 14 years ago |

Surely I can't be the only one who prefers PageUp/PageDown to flip through webpages? This breaks PageDown pretty badly.

zoop 14 years ago |

both smooth scrolling and non smooth scrolling modes are very choppy for me. I think it has something to do with the large CSS3 transforms.

2.8 quad core, os x, chrome 19.0.1084.56

darkstalker 14 years ago | |

works fine on firefox 13, core2 1.8ghz, integrated intel gpu

makmanalp 14 years ago |

I get whole screen "blink"s on OSX 10.7 chrome 19, especially in the beginning when boxes of text are moving in an out. Just when you think one is out, it flashes in for a second and disappears. Probably an off-by-1 or something?

arjunnarayan 14 years ago | |

It seems a little broken (and flickery) on Chrome in OS X. It worked great in Firefox and Safari.

RBerenguel 14 years ago | | |

Worked neatly in my Chrome (latest version non-dev available,) Mac OS 10.6.8

5vforest 14 years ago |

I like it, but the demo doesn't really do it justice. I would slow everything down a bit (missed most of the transformations on my first pass, they happened way too quickly), and maybe work on styling a bit more.

gaius 14 years ago |

Now this is how you do parallax http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He4Cmkakk4g :-)

Kerrick 14 years ago |

Looks like SuperScrollOrama. http://johnpolacek.github.com/superscrollorama/

vivianhui 14 years ago |

I probably shouldn't have looked at this on an iPad...

esbwhat 14 years ago |

All those parallax sites aren't as impressive if you have smooth scrolling disabled

josscrowcroft 14 years ago |

A call for parallax scrolling sanity: "Oh God, My Eyes!!!"

Neat script though.

taude 14 years ago |

One of the better JS libraries I've seen lately!

jastr 14 years ago |

reminds me of http://2011.beercamp.com/

derpmeister 14 years ago | |

Skrollr is pretty smooth on my system but that page is terribly laggy and all pixely when you scroll. It's not even readable because everything just lumps together.

brittohalloran 14 years ago |

Perfect thing for a HN demo

antimora 14 years ago |

it made me dizzy =)

jsavimbi 14 years ago |

I have yet to receive a request for parallax. And we I do I will kindly point them in the direction of any marketing firm who knows nothing about usability or implementation.

sadga 14 years ago | |

The same ones that put contact information in an image so you can't select and copy it, and hide that image behind a transparent div, so you can't even download it. Ugh.

jsavimbi 14 years ago | | |

Yes, those ones.

drivebyacct2 14 years ago |

(I ask this as a Mac owner), but I have to wonder how many of the "Wow, Awesome" posts come from Mac users with proper smooth scrolling. It's just awkward on a Windows machine. I was hoping for something parallaxy like Github's 404 pages.

I guess I'm on a mouse now, but even on my last laptop, the "smooth scrolling" was the regular 20px jump scrolling but with smoothing between jumps which would seem to make this still fairly jumpy.

Genmutant 14 years ago | |

Works smooth for me (Laptop, i7 Quad, Win 7, Firefox 14)

nilliams 14 years ago | | |

I think the parent is referring to the actual scrolling mechanic of the browser with a standard mouse-wheel rather than a performance issue.

Genmutant 14 years ago | | |

I didn't think of that - I actually have a Logitech mouse where I can switch between the clicking scrolling and the freewheeling.

drivebyacct2 14 years ago | | |

Even then, in Windows, you can't scroll pixel by pixel can you? I'm not sure if you're familiar with Apple touchpads, but I've never seen anything emulate their ability to scroll at literally continuous increments. Even with my Logitech (that also switches) "free wheeling" still has a minimum increment. It's configurable, but it's just "jumping" relative to the Apple Trackpad mechanic.

Wilduck 14 years ago | | |

Click and hold the center mouse button (scroll wheel). Notice the four arrows that pop up. While still holding the center button down, move the mouse up/down, and you'll scroll smoothly. I use this whenever I'm away from my mac.

tomerv 14 years ago | | |

Newer versions of Firefox have smooth scrolling. Try running the demo on Chrome, and you'll see the problem.

mrose 14 years ago |

Always nice to see the bounds of UI scripting being pushed to the browser's limit. I won't be surprised to see some of these position manipulation paradigms integrated into the core browsing experience (in sort of a jQuery-esque fashion) in the near future.

Nice choice with the name as well. Easy to rememeber and has a good typing rhythm.

tvandervossen 14 years ago |

THIS IS THE AWESOME!