Walkway.js | Hacker News Reader

Walkway.js

connoratherton.com

351 pointsconnoratherton50 comments

Hey! Guy who did the Polygon PS4 and Xbox review SVG animations here.

This is really great stuff; has a super friendly API to boot.

FWIW, we also released a generalized library for some of the things we were doing WRT frame-based and duration-based animation:

https://github.com/voxmedia/metronome

(Reason being that for some animations, we wanted it to finish in a precise amount of time, but for others, maintaining frame rate was paramount, even if total elapsed time was longer)

The current link does not work for me (Firefox 36.0a1 on Debian). The correct content seems to be here: http://connor-personal.herokuapp.com/walkway

Why doesn't it work? I imagine it's this funky DNS config:

  sergio@sergio-laptop:~ > dig www.connoratherton.com

  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;www.connoratherton.com.		IN	A

  ;; ANSWER SECTION:
  www.connoratherton.com.	3529	IN	CNAME	http://connor-personal.herokuapp.com.
  http://connor-personal.herokuapp.com. 229 IN CNAME us-east-1-a.route.herokuapp.com.
  us-east-1-a.route.herokuapp.com. 55 IN	A	50.19.235.218

This is not valid CNAME content. Does this work on some browsers???

Switched to Google domains a few days ago, still configuring it properly. Thanks for letting me know about the link, looking into it.

Trying to configure DNS settings for herokuapp.com isn't going to work, given that it isn't, you know, actually your domain to configure.

What you should have is something like

  connoratherton.com     A     54.221.226.116
  www.connoratherton.com CNAME connor-personal.herokuapp.com

Alternately, if your domain registrar supports ANAME or ALIAS, you should have, respectively,

  connoratherton.com     ANAME connor-personal.herokuapp.com
  www.connoratherton.com CNAME connor-personal.herokuapp.com

  connoratherton.com     ALIAS connor-personal.herokuapp.com
  www.connoratherton.com CNAME connor-personal.herokuapp.com

I bet you could do this pretty effectively with GitHub pages instead of a full blown Heroku app.

Do you happen to have any extra invites for Google domains?

Got one. Thank you to the folks on HN :)

I do if still needed, drop me a line (email in profile)

Firefox 33.0.2 on OSX 10.9 here.

It renders well if the tab is in focus (fantastic work!) but there's a bug: if I open it in a tab in the background, and visit it later (after the animation would have completed?) I see only a nearly-blank page. Confused me for a bit, as I open mass-tabs here on HN...

Same here (Chrome 38 on Win 8.1)

I get the same problem, tried on both Chrome and Internet Explorer (Windows 7).

I guess OP doesn't use requestAnimationFrame, otherwise, it would wait for the tab being focused.

Edit: Checked the code. He uses requestAnimationFrame.

You meant the opposite though, right?

In Linux, I get a varying, incomplete image with Firefox (33) and nothing with Chrome (38).

The Page Visibility API would help fix this. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/User_expe...

I got the same problem with Safari 8 on OS X 10.10

Sorry guys, I really didn't expect this much traffic. I still have to do some compatibility testing, I'm aiming to do it this weekend.

Works well on Windows Phone 8.1.

I'm telling you because I'm pretty sure I'm the only Windows Phone user worldwide.

No you're not :)

I made this http://grayarea.org/theater/ after being inspired by the Polygon animations.

I'm using Two.js https://github.com/jonobr1/two.js to do the SVG interpreting and processing.

This article by Jake Archibald does a good job of explaining the underlying mechanism used by libraries such as walkway.js: http://jakearchibald.com/2013/animated-line-drawing-svg/.

Hey Connor, awesome work. You would have saved us a lot of work had you created this a year ago ;)

Really silly request, but could someone provide an implementation where I can just drop in an svg and it would have this effect? Please, and thank you.

Have a look at lazy line painter

http://lazylinepainter.info/

Gotcha. The next step is making an animatable SVG. I'm trying to follow https://inkscape.org/doc/tracing/tutorial-tracing.html

A bit of trouble on OS X Yosemite, running Chrome. if i open it an new tab, nothing happens. cmd + r and it works.

Nice work, looks great.

agreed!

If I open this in a tab and wait a while to go there, it never plays the animation.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/z57g1fmmn10qmej/Screenshot%202014-...

This seems like an awful lot of code for animating the path's strokeDashArray and strokeDashOffset attributes. Especially if you're already using another library with built in transitions, such as D3 or even jQuery.

Very nice. It's funny, I keep clicking on these 'new JS library' links thinking, oh geez, not another one... but then I leave thinking, wow, that is very impressive and super useful.

make sure to leave and come back/hit refresh etc to try to get the animation to fire. looks cool, although there was nothing on the screen the first time i went to the tab on Chrome/MacOSX

it seems that it doesnt run if I open this in a new tab and stay on the current page but if I reload the page it works (all done with chrome) Seems like a page focus event gone wrong

Cool! We've been using a similar technique in our in-app sales page, also inspired by the Verge articles. I'll upload a video when I get a chance.

Works great for me on Safari 8 (Yosemite)!

On my machine the animation never plays in Opera 12, and in Chrome and Firefox the black color is never applied.

Thanks, I'll look into it now.

In Chrome on my machine, the black colour is not applied also.

Furthermore if I middleclick to open a new tab, the animation does not play.

"server not found".

I don't know if HN crashed the server or if there is some irony involved.

How would somebody do this w/ D3? Are there any similar bl.ocks that anybody knows about?

From d3js.org site I do get to this [1] (click the page number to to animate lines) not sure about the easing functionality however.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/09/us/yellen-fed-...

Since you can write more or less, arbitrary "tween" functions in D3 (I learnt more than I wanted to about these when I wrote the dynamic "semaphore pie" we used here [1] ) it's relatively viable to do it for paths created from within D3. For paths already present and wanting to be selected... I guess it would work pretty much the same, since d3 selectors are more or less good to go with embedded SVGs, IIRC.

It's actually a very nice trick (and I love moving things around in graphs), and I'm intrigued by how I'd do it with D3. If I have any free time this weekend I'll look into it ;)

[1] VanillaSEO: http://vanillaseo.com/report/20141030fdec7fda61eafac3b8dca58...

Ninja edit (or almost): Here's the relevant part of d3 docs about tweens: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Transitions

You can transition the stroke-dasharray property and use element.getTotalLength to determine the total length of the path. Here’s a bl.ock:

http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/5649592

And here’s an older graphic that demonstrates the technique in use:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/20/movies/among-t...

We also used this technique to render the progress map in The Russia Left Behind:

http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/10/13/russia/

Site's not available?

was gonna ask if inspired by Verge/Polygon console reviews from awhile back... nice.

Should be called Hawt.JS

not working in Safari with Yosemite.

Works fine for me with the same setup (Safari 8 on Yosemite).

Link broken?

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