Following a chat I just had, I thought I’d write a bit of a techie post about JavaScript animation. If we had to display a large body of information on a homepage a year or two ago, the design would have looked fairly messy – but since this whole JavaScript ‘movement’, we can use carousels and accordions to present information within a fairly constrained area (like Coda did, originally).

Fairly recently, Apple have started doing this mouseover accordion thing everyone seems so fond of (above) - and I’ve got to say that I’m not a huge fan. A developer rightly pointed out to me that people tend to want to click on things, regardless of mouseover – if it was clickable, I wouldn’t mind… but mouseover? Anyway, what I do like about the whole accordion thing is that you can fit a large body of info into a 200 x 600px space.

But, not wanting to copy Apple on everything (despite the fact that my clients “want apple”) - I found this… Kwicks;

It’s a nice variation on the old Flash trick of mouseover expanding blocks, available now as a plugin for jQuery. You can even have this as onClick – which is perfect! It’s something I’ve got to try, and I feel it’s a far better (albeit very similar) solution to the Apple accordian.

View the Kwicks demo
Tutorial on the Apple Accordian
Tutorial on Kwicks
See it used here

1 Comment

• The chat was with Russ who has an unusually large….

  Buzz
  Mon 30th June 2008 reply

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