Makisu - CSS 3D dropdown concept
soulwire.github.com
soulwire.github.com
Anyway, I think it's a neat concept. It runs correctly for me in FF (slow, but FF seems to be having problems taking advantage of my hardware in general for 3D stuff).
On Chrome and Midori it's fast, but the swinging effect gets clipped to the straight edges of the menus, and the text only shows up in the menu headings, rather than for the menu items themselves.
If I change the 'line-height' property for '.list dd' to 0, I can just make out the tops of the menu item ext, so I'm guessing that this is a positioning problem.
I wrote another library that relies heavily on 3D transforms to do folding effects (http://oridomi.com) and it's frustrating seeing the same issues you see in Makisu in Firefox.
Mozilla's been iterating quickly, so hopefully it's just a matter of time.
i wonder what the cause is however. 3D stuff may go more or less fast on FF, but that one is particularly super slow.
It's a neat demo, I just fear what developers will do with it.
Although, this demo is the equivalent of a spoon manufacturer demonstrating their spoons by having a picture of someone eating a giant bucket of gravy. Maybe the manufacturer can't be blamed for obesity, but they could help out by providing a healthier demonstration of how their product should be used.
In any case, a neat concept. Works great on Safari.
It'd be cool if you could make them flutter a bit by moving the mouse around or by grabbing and dragging the edges (or some other means).
Think of them as like curtains.
Or perhaps it could be like there is a constant slight breeze, making them move like a curtain in a gentle breeze.
Anyway, just some thoughts.
EDIT: Grammar.
I agree with some others that the animation speed is a little slow to give that suspension of disbelief, and the menus are a little too static once the animation has finished, but I have useful suggestions there because they would stop being very useful if they moved around. Maybe the effect would work best in the form of a dropdown menu?
Depends on the situation.
But this might not be usable for a Web App, but there may be some situations.
Romaji[1] seems like a fun place to plunder exciting sounding words from.
Anime and Manga became mainstream popular X years ago, where X is long enough for those early fans to become old enough to start naming products.
As far as I can tell it's simply because Japan (and the Japanese language) is perceived as exotic, futuristic, and cool, which are exactly the image the tech industry wants.
My perception is that in the '80s, it was done even more randomly ("pick cool-sounding word off of sushi menu"), and people are a bit more sophisticated now and more likely to actually consider the meaning, but the root cause seems the same.
I suppose the image of "futuristic Japan" might be waning these days, but the mainstream popularity of Japanese anime/manga in other countries probably picks up the slack...
It's funny, because anyone who's actually been to Japan can tell you that it's not the least bit futuristic anymore. And I'm not talking about traditional culture - I'm talking about an entire country stuck in the 70s/80s, technologically speaking. There are rare pockets of fresh air, mostly provided by the outside world (like smartphones), but the Japanese have by and large failed to understand or grasp the digital revolution.
Tell me something - is there a single internationally famous Japanese software company that you can name? Even if you want to talk about famous Japanese programmers, the only one I can think of is Matz, but he's Mormon and has 4 children - not exactly your average Japanese guy.
but this: > because anyone who's actually been to Japan can tell you that it's not the least bit futuristic anymore ... > the Japanese have by and large failed to understand or grasp the digital revolution.
... is quite silly.
Japanese society's adoption of tech advances, as far as I can tell, is neither particularly advanced, nor particularly backwards compared to other societies. The details differ, so from certain narrow perspectives it may appear as either. It's simply a different place, and simplistic comparisons ("more" or "less") don't capture much. I know when I visit my relatives in America (I've lived in Japan since the '90s), walking about town there's a definite perception that not a whole lot has changed since about 1950, even in the richest and most urbane areas, because American society is both rather conservative and kind of cheap; Japan is a whole different story, because they love "new".
In terms of industry, the stereotypical Japanese style of working, which favors continual incremental advances and attention to detail (sort of a "craftsman's" approach) over large but disruptive leaps and fixation on "the big picture", is fundamentally sort of conservative, and this is not well-suited to very fast-changing tech nor to software (where avoiding big changes inevitability leads to massive unmaintainable heaps of bit-rotting code...). This factor affect big companies (a mainstay of Japanese industry) more than small ones, because big companies also have the usual bureaucratic overhead, but it's a cultural artifact, and can be seen everywhere.
In addition, a big damper on Japanese software has been the relative isolation of Japanese software developers from the west, where much of the important research and development is happening. There's some interaction, but the Japanese are often a conspicuous absence in forums with otherwise international participation, despite a large domestic software industry. As far as I can tell, this stems in large part from a simple lack of confidence in English: Europeans are willing to participate even if their English is pretty shaky (it may be a chore, but it gets the job done), but Japanese are not, even when they have a fairly workable grasp of English. I know many Japanese whose English is perfectly acceptable when they're forced to use it, but they're absolutely loathe to do so unless forced.
The Japanese software developers I've talked to about such things are perfectly aware of these issues. But awareness, unfortunately, is not enough to change the system, at least quickly.
Things will work out in the end, I'm pretty sure, because the competence and work-ethic of Japanese software developers in general seems pretty good (many of those I know are top-notch); but before that comes the pain...