Tourist.js: really flexible tours by Easel | Hacker News Reader

Tourist.js: really flexible tours by Easel

easelinc.github.io

46 pointsmrbogle15 comments

I like the concept and was going to star it until I read one of the dependencies is Backbone. Otherwise, there are many other libraries that only require one dependency.

https://github.com/EragonJ/Trip.js https://github.com/usablica/intro.js https://github.com/sorich87/bootstrap-tour

Definitely dig the look and feel of this though.

Thanks for the feedback. We just use the eventing. It would be pretty easy to include the BB Events mixin in there. Maybe that's 0.1

We use Backbone as our frontend framework at my startup. A few months ago we evaluated guided-tour libraries such as Joyride, Bootstrap Tour and others. We liked Joyride at the time because it was declarative with some simple global setup and teardown callbacks, but it quickly became apparent it wasn't sophisticated enough for a rich web app where, in Backbone's paradigm, you're waiting for sync events and other events before continuing through the guided tour. We ended up having to fork and modify Joyride to support the behavior we wanted. This lib looks like a promising generalized version of what we had to fork Joyride to do!

Thanks! This was exactly our train of thought as well. We needed to be able to open windows and menus, wait for the user to do something in the editor, etc. The setup, teardown, and bind options per step in tourist made it really easy to do everything we needed to do.

I looked at this component when we wanted to make a "getting started" tour for Aha! (http://www.aha.io). However, I didn't like the idea of a linear tour where you must complete one step to get to the next. Instead I created https://github.com/aha-app/getting_started_balloons (for Rails 3 and JQuery) which allows multiple balloons to be shown at once.

The slightly novel aspect is the use of SVG to draw the arrow to the element you want to highlight. This allows flexibility in positioning the balloon so that it doesn't obscure some other interesting aspect of the screen.

Really neat, but the dependency on Backbone is going to get in the way of adoption.

That's what I believe as well.

Easel.io is a really beautiful looking product. I just played around with the demo tour and it worked pretty well though a little quirky. Are you using Tourist.js to implement the demo tour?

whats the browser compatibility like? not so much the looks but function wise. I'd love to use this on my upcoming project, but I need IE7 compatibility. Cheers great work.

We dont support IE7 in Easel, and have not checked this in IE7. Feel free to do so and let me know if it works!

Not working here, chrome 27.0.1453.93 on OSx

When you click does the tooltip appear at all? We'd love to get it fixed up.

Hmm, what happens? I have the same setup, and it works just fine. Are there errors in the console?

Hey Ben - nice work! Here's what I see on chrome: http://i.imgur.com/IEaJJvx.png

Thanks for the heads up Max!

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