Thursday, May 1st, 2008
Apple Store: New Effects
Category: Showcase
I was perusing the Apple Store, getting ready for the dream dual-announcements of iPhone 3G + Macbook Pro, when I saw a new effect. When you go to a product page, there is now an enlarge link that zooms in the given products. You can click on them to go even closer, and then you can mouse around to see every nook and cranny. Double click to get back out, or close to go all the way back.
Take a peak:
Thanks to view source, it appears that Coherent, the library we just talked about, is in use here. Makes sense for a Cocoa style databinding tool to be in use at Apple!
2.9 rating from 17 votes
I took a look, pretty cool. But are these really “AJAX effects”?
slick.
Damn, that’s a nice effect. I do wonder if there’s a small team of Apple web developers just thinking up this cool stuff then working out where they could put it.
I wonder how long until we see plugins to achieve this in the various libraries!
Very kool and useful.
Its like scene7 effects without the costs. http://www.scene7.com
It could use a loading indicator, at first I thought it was broken because it took so long to load the large image.
Firebug’s Net tab -> JS tab:
72 requests, 678 KB
gotta love those effects : )
The zoomable image to get “detail” on products seems as useful of a feature as the “drag the item to your shopping cart” DHTML demo. I don’t know of any retail site that implements the latter, and the former seems to be useful, but most product images are of such crappy quality that zooming doesn’t really help you see more.
Unbelieveable page size, thats Dojo for you. They dont even gzip their content….eeeek
It probably works well only on Safari and Mac… at least on few years old PC on Firefox it’s far from slick.
I did a little experiment last December. I never ended up using it but it’s similar.
http://www.mintohomes.com/dev/zoomer.asp
On Gucci.com (I think Thomas Fuchs of Scriptaculous worked on it?) there’s a nice zoom-in-and-fade effect on products which “reveals” the higher-resolution image underneath, a really nice implementation. Actually the whole site has some fun UI ideas and nifty effects, I recommend checking it out (Ajaxian covered its relaunch a while back, too.)
@medikoo The effect works just fine with IE7.