General Description
Animated effects (aka 'transitions') provide visual cues to changing information in a user interface as well as increase the user's engagement in the experience. There are various kinds of effects: fade, ease, wipe, glow, zoom, fisheye, etc.
Only limited opportunities to effectively integrate animated effects in the core Dojo (Dijit) widget toolkit are currently being exploited. In particular, only the accordion and tooltip in the core Dijit widget set use animated effects. Yet numerous untapped animated effects are currently available in the DojoX and DojoFX libraries and animated effect APIs. In contrast, animated effects are extensively integrated into competitive widget sets.
The gap between the animated effects in Dojo and Flex 3 was analyzed. The results of this analysis include:
- Flex provides many gratuitous animated effects that would not be appropriate to use in IBM software.
- Dojo has APIs that support all the animated effects needed, but has not created samples or built them into its Dijit widget library.
The goal of this project is to close the Flex/Dojo animated effects gap by
- identifying and then integrating the appropriate animated effects into the Dojo widgets to support IBM development needs and customer needs and
- providing the appropriate examples on Dojo.org.