Tinseltown.js

Tinseltown is a small (< 4KB) JS and CSS front-end library to add faux flicker loading effects, a la Hollywood hacker movies, to various elements on a web page.

Visit the website for a demo. Or clone this repo and take a look at examples/basic.html.

Tinseltown uses CSS animations for the effects themselves, but needs to have a small JavaScript component (< 1KB) to actually make it work. What makes these effects work is randomness. When the animations aresec initiated, they are given random animation-delay values as offsets; otherwise they would all play in sync, invalidating the purpose.

Getting Started

The easiest method is to simply drop the compiled tinseltown.min.js and tinseltown.min.css files from the root folder of this repo into the front-end of whatever web project you are working on. You can now skip to the Usage section and use everything as-is.

Customizing Animation Timings (Advanced)

It is possible to use Sass variables to customize animation timings if you want to dive deeper and only use this library for its randomization features.

In your Sass file, set any of the variables in the following example to CSS time values of your choice before importing tinseltown.min.css.

$tnsl-flicker-duration: 1s;             // default 0.5s
$tnsl-flickerQuick-duration: 0.5s;      // default 0.2s
$tnsl-slideFromLeft-duration: 0.2s;     // default 0.1s
$tnsl-slideFromRight-duration: 0.2s;    // default 0.1s

@import 'tinseltown.scss'               // place *after* overriden variables

Note: The default values above were chosen to look good when used with the default maxDelay value of 1 second and vice versa.

Of course, feel free to download the tinseltown.scss file directly from the src folder in this repo and place it in your project.

Usage

Once the JS and CSS files are available to use in your project's front-end, use the following CSS classes to set animations.

tnsl-flicker            // standard Hollywood-style flicker effect
tnsl-flickerQuick       // shorter variant of flicker
tnsl-slideFromLeft      // quick slide from left (using translate3d(-100%, 0, 0))
tnsl-slideFromRight     // quick slide from right (using translate3d(100%, 0, 0))

In many cases, however, your design may benefit from some randomness. This is why a special, random animation class is included as well.

tnsl-random

When you trigger the basic case (described in the next section), all elements with the tnsl-random class are first randomly assigned one of the above animation classes before playing. Every time the page loads, your tnsl-random classes may get a different set of effects.

Basic Trigger

Once you are ready to trigger the animations, call

tnslInit([maxDelay])

where maxDelay is the longest time (in seconds) that you want to allow any single animation-delay value to be.

This means that the start of each effect will be between 0 and maxDelay seconds from when the function is called. This does not guarantee that all the effects will be spread across the first maxDelay seconds, because randomness can still cause them to bunch up and trigger in the first second... or even half that.

You can omit the argument if you want, and a default of 1 second will be used.

Note: The default animation timings in the compiled CSS were tuned to look good when used with the default maxDelay value of 1 second and vice versa.

If you want to trigger the animations at page load time, simply use

window.onload = function() { tnslInit(); }      // without jQuery
$(document).ready(function() { tnslInit(); });  // with jQuery

or otherwise add the function call to whatever handles your page load scripts.

More Granular Control (Advanced)

If you want more granular control over the animations on your page, you can use some convenient utility functions included in Tinseltown.

tnslReplaceRandom([animations])

Processes all elements that have the tnsl-random class, assigning them random animations.

Optionally provide it an array of animation names, esp. if you do not want it to assign a certain animation or two. Pick from strings flicker, flickerQuick, slideFromLeft and slideFromRight. All animations used if no argument given.

Note: It's highly recommended that you process any tnsl-random elements before calling animation functions, or they will simply not be animated. Calling animation trigger functions before and after processing all randoms may cause all animations to play twice, unless you perform JavaScript trickery to prevent this.

The maxDelay argument

For info on the optional maxDelay argument accepted by the following functions, refer to the Basic Trigger section.

tnslPlayFlicker([maxDelay])

Triggers all flicker animations.

tnslPlayFlickerQuick([maxDelay])

Triggers all flickerQuick animations.

tnslPlaySlideFromLeft([maxDelay])

Triggers all slideFromLeft animations.

tnslPlaySlideFromRight([maxDelay])

Triggers all slideFromRight animations.

tnslPlayAllFlicker([maxDelay])

Triggers all flicker and flickerQuick animations.

tnslPlayAllSlide([maxDelay])

Triggers all slideFromLeft and slideFromRight animations.

tnslPlayAll([maxDelay])

Triggers all animations.

tnslInit([maxDelay])

Processes all tnsl-random elements and triggers all animations.

Contribute

Tinseltown.js could use some help. If you find issues, or just want to contribute improvements, feel free to clone, modify, test and send pull requests. When developing locally:

1. Have Node.js and npm installed.
2. Clone this repo and run npm install at the top level.
3. Edit src/tinseltown.js and src/tinseltown.scss.
4. Run npx gulp to build the tinseltown.min.* files (do not edit these files directly). Optionally, run npx gulp watch to update the minified files as you make your edits in src.
5. Open example/basic.html in your browser or import these minified files into your own local HTML file to test visually.

You can contact me @Antrikshy or via private messaging on reddit.

Potential Features

1. Add support for scrolling. It would be nice to either support scroll-activated animation triggers natively, or at least allow users to trigger all animations inside a supplied DOM element, so that they can set it up themselves.
2. Maybe allow users to select a random flicker animation only or slide animation only.
3. Come up with more hacker-style CSS animations.