Almost every time a new meme pops up in my Twitter feed, I think of a witty version to create. I'm not alone in this. Memes are often a way to acknowledge a shared experience or idea. In a variation of the "Is this a pigeon" meme that has been making the rounds online, a designer Daryl Ginn joked about the elementary nature of most applications that say they use artificial intelligence.
Modern browsers support playing video via the <video></video> element. Most browsers also have access to webcams via the MediaDevices.getUserMedia() API. But even with those two things combined, we can’t really access and manipulate those pixels directly.
Fortunately, browsers have a Canvas API that allows us to draw graphics using JavaScript. We can actually draw images to the <canvas></canvas> from the video itself, which gives us the ability to manipulate and play with those pixels.
Everything you learn here about how to manipulate pixels will give you a foundation to work with images and videos of any kind or any source, not just canvas.
While browsing the latest award-winning websites, you may notice a lot of fancy image distortion animations or neat 3D effects. Most of them are created with WebGL, an API allowing GPU-accelerated image processing effects and animations. They also tend to use libraries built on top of WebGL such as three.js or pixi.js. Both are very powerful tools to create respectively 2D and 3D scenes.
But, you should keep in mind that those libraries were not originally designed to create slideshows or animate DOM elements. There is a library designed just for that, though, and we’re going to cover how to use it here in this post.
I came across a couple such animations a while ago and this gave me the idea of creating my own versions with as little code as possible, no external libraries, using various methods, some of which take advantage of more recent features we can use these days, such as CSS variables. This article is going to guide you through the process of building these demos.
The year was 1995; Toy Story hit the theaters, kids were obsessively collecting little cardboard circles and Kiss From a Rose was being badly sung by everyone. I was a gangly ten-year-old, and like any other relatively tall kid I was often addressed to by "you must be so good at basketball!". So I practiced and practiced spending hours on the court of my elementary school. Eventually, I realized, much to the dismay of aunts and other cheek-pinchers alike, that while occupying vertical real estate might give you an advantage in the art of basketball, it does not ensure it.
Fast forward 21 years later. Now a tall and gangly developer, still bad at basketball, I was faced with a project: Designing and implementing a full motion video web basketball game for the NBA’s Detroit Pistons. Throwing balls around is one thing; throwing pixels around — now that's finally a basketball challenge I can ace!
The question I am asked most frequently: what animation tool do you recommend?
Having worked with a slew of them, I can tell you there is no right answer. It's a complicated question and complicated answer. This post serves to clarify what to use, and when, to get you working with the right tool for the job.
If you’re here for React, we’ve got you covered! Jump down to the React section below and we’ll break down what to use and how to use it.