That's a little animation I created, which I've taken to calling "Skeletango". Wanna see it again? Knock yourself out:
As a web developer, I tend to be a pretty nuts & bolts kind of guy. I'm much better at functionality than
look & feel. Also, as a user I find sites that rely heavily on Flash
to be pretty annoying. You probably know the kind of sites I'm talking about. A "loading" bar displays as soon as you go
there, then some introductory movie plays (usually with the option to "skip intro"), and the site itself
(which looks more like the menu from an action movie DVD than any conventional notion of a website) is loaded with all
sorts of eye & ear candy - annoying background music, garish sound effects and animation as you click on
menu items, et. al. If you don't know what I'm talking about, take a look at
this (and go see the movie, too - Heath Ledger's
Joker is not to be missed). That sort of thing is fine for Hollywood, I guess, but has little place in the kind of business
applications and other useful sites I'm interested in building.
Having said that, I do think there is a place for bells & whistles like animation, as long as it is classy and
unobtrusive. For example, on a running club site that
I've taken over as web master for, I created a simple and modest animated effect - you'll notice that there is a small stick figure
that runs along the menu bar to any menu item that you mouse over. A visitor may get a little kick out of this, but isn't likely to find it annoying,
confusing, or in the way. If you are a web developer, even one focused primarily on implementing business logic, I think that kind of
simple animation should be in your bag of tricks. So, ever at a loss for new content to put up here, I got the idea of
doing a succinct tutorial on DHTML animation, similar to the one I did for AJAX a few posts ago. This idea inspired me to create
"Skeletango" as a slightly more elaborate demonstration. I plan to make it a few seconds longer, and may tweak the motion
a bit, but overall it came out better than I expected.
For now, enjoy my little dancing stick figures. If you are interested in web development, and are curious about how to add
something like this to your own sites, come back in a week or so, and I will explain it in detail.
