Monday, August 27th, 2007
Reflex: Cover flow for your soul
>Christian Effenberger, Canvas Library Creator Extraordinarie, has created Reflex.js 1.1, which allows you to add a Cover Flow effect (including reflection) to images on your web pages.
It works in all the major browsers – Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+, IE6+ (tilting missing) and Safari. On older browsers, it’ll degrade and your visitors won’t notice a thing.
As per usual, usage is via a simple microformat using CSS classes such as reflex iopacity75.
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Really slow, but the effect is really nice.
How is it done?
Really nice, but as mentioned above not very fast.
In addition: tilting works in IE6 for me
Its also mentioned on the authors website.
He uses canvas to achieve the effects. However, this is far from coverflow. It only renders the images, but does not implement the interactive functionality such as actual browsing.
Considering the rendering speed just to do the 3 images, it might be difficult to achieve ajax based coverflow with this library.
Being able to use javascript to show an image reflection is a huge time-saver for a programmer with little design/Photoshop ability. This one is pretty slow, but great work.
Using CSS classes in that way is not a microformat. Microformats are agreed standards for semantic classnames, documented on the official microformats site.
For real coverflow (with animation) I think only flash will cut it. I just don’t see canvas being powerful enough for something like this.