Wrigley’s Magic Weight Ball is my first project using the Raphaël JavaScript Library and it just went live. I used Raphaël JS version 1.5.2 which you can download from GitHub. The project requirements came through as only being an iPad version that responded to a shake event. Getting to use a new technology for a front-end project where you only have to support one resolution and one browser is an excellent opportunity to try new things. I knew in the back of my head that they would want a non-shakeable static version as well but they just didn’t ask for it yet. Internet Explorer still came into consideration when I was evaluating technology solutions because I was certain it would come up eventually.
When I saw the Nissan Leaf site I was blown away by the heavy JavaScript animations being used. It really reminded me of the early Flash animations and sites in a way. The Hacker News submission I saw the site from pointed out that the animations were being handled by the Raphaël JavaScript Library. This was still fresh in my mind when I got this project so I loaded up the Raphaël demos pages in a ever browser I test on, IE6-9, Safari, Firefox and Chrome and they all worked! This was the library for this project.
I finished up the iPad version of the site http://content.theknot.com/sitelets/magic-weight-ball/ipad which requires iOS 4.2 or higher and was pretty happy with the results. It responds to a full shake event to give you another tip, the tip will bob lightly in the water when moved a little bit and the tip orients to the iPad. When the tip is touched it provides a little modal with more details. The site even supports landscape and portrait viewing.
About half way through developing the iPad version the email I was expecting arrived. “Oh no!” they said, “We need a static non-shakable version for desktop users to visit.” I was already prepared though. When I though about a desktop version I first defaulted to Flash but I wanted to give Raphaël a try first. With a IE6 PNG alpha transparency fix and a small work around for IE to get the Raphaël image src it was up and running on the desktop.
You can visit http://content.theknot.com/sitelets/magic-weight-ball/ to see the result and if you happen to hit the page in an iPad you will get a slightly modified version that still responds to the shake events, always giving the best experience possible.
The weight ball interface itself is a series of 3 layered PNG images. The top most image is a 24bit eight ball and the rest of the tips, triangles and back black images are all 8bit PNG images with the a properly picked matte color. The total site size was reduced as much as possible and the designers loved the look. I reduced the number of colors where ever possible and used a pattern dither, it really seemed to look the best even though it bumped up the file size a bit.
For this animation interface the Raphaël JavaScript Library was a perfect fit and I was able to provide a cross platform and cross browser experience that I was very proud of.
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