This seems like a neat plugin, but I don't understand all the mega excitement.
What am I missing, why is this so earth shattering (read the other comments in this thread)? What is justifying people saying $37 is a "frictionless" price?
What are you planning to do that makes you so excited by this?
I think its a combination of the obvious usefulness of this code, combined with the impeccable execution and presentation, combined with its effective employment of bleeding edge technologies. It's basically a "perfect storm" of frontend library awesomeness.
Erm... for sorting and filtering data in a way that implicitly describes the transformations in the presented dataset caused by said sorting/filtering through the animation effects. Information density++
I honestly see this as obvious. I'm not trying to be funny. And I can't work out if you don't think this is obvious, or you don't agree that this would be useful.
Also imagine using it to fine tune an optimisation problem: you adjust a series of sliders that define the relative priorities you place on certain properties of the items in the dataset, it then does a weighted sort. You can see directly how the changes on the sliders affect the ranking of the items.
If you didn't have the animation it would not be easy to see which items had risen and which fallen. You would have to compare your memory of the order before the change with what you're looking at. This is cognitively very difficult, and it would lead to you toggling the value back and forth endlessly and comparing the order.
Basically any stat or inventory interface in a game would benefit from this. Or any interface where the task is solving an optimisation problem really.
Not all whizzy effects are gimmicks to be sneered at from the terminal. Don't throw the UX baby out with the eye candy bathwater.
EDIT: Another example - when toggling between different properties to sort the dataset by, the amount and speed of the animation describes the correlation of the two properties, without requiring you to parse any text. Animation is just another way to impart information that doesn't require reading, alongside color, size, and other spatial/physical properties.
I see the argument but honestly, I'm not buying it. It's a valiant attempt to portray this information (a differential) through animation, but it's too noisy and chaotic, particularly when more than a few of the items need to reposition themselves. It looks nice but at least from the demos on that page I don't feel like it's really helping increase the information density of the data being presented.
At the end of the day, I think it's polish that for almost all cases the user will be better served if the animation were to be turned off since it is a waste of time. It is very cool though!
My thought was that if you need this type of behavior on your site $37 dollars is much less expensive than the amount of time it would take for you to pull all the elements of this together yourself.
Don't things ever strike you as potentially very useful before you think of a specific use case?
In this case, it's bound to be useful when you're building interfaces for webapps, to let you do new things.
For instance, an onlline clone of Football Manager where gamers want to examine the stats of the players in the other team, but from a whole lot of different perspectives: graphically in formation, or in a list sorted in differrent ways. The animations may not be essential there but they certainly don't hurt. Games compete for their visual fidelity.
I run an online Football (american) sim, and I am sitting here dreaming up how to use it.
I hadn't considered the stats, that's interesting. Same could be said for the draft, and free agency.
Both are really hard to order, and see useful data that way. I'll have a lot of variations though, and a lot of items. Just the draft is 384 rows(players)
Not sure how appropriate this is to American Football, but it'd be a neat way to transform between different team formations that the user wants to try.
That's true, I hadn't considered that. You could also group them in some interesting ways like that.
The thing is, I wouldn't want to move pictures like that though. They'd actually be tables to move like that, so the user could move the tables around, and then make selections within those tables.
You're always making some choice with an American Football game. A lot of ordered data is what it comes down to.
I've been meaning to update my photography portfolio, which would be a great use for this. The "relayout" demo is quite engaging--I played with it for a good 15+ seconds, which is a long time to interact with anything lacking content (http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/relayout.html).
After playing with it a bit, I'm guessing it would be most useful for image galleries that contain a lot of irregularly sized images and you want to fit a lot of them on the screen. Or something like Google Image Search.
What am I missing, why is this so earth shattering (read the other comments in this thread)? What is justifying people saying $37 is a "frictionless" price?
What are you planning to do that makes you so excited by this?