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I hate to make such a banal comment, but when I see things like this I cannot wait to redesign my website and use this ultra-cool technologies. After programmin

I hate to make such a banal comment, but when I see things like this I cannot wait to redesign my website and use this ultra-cool technologies. After programming for 25 years I am grateful to this plugin and the developer(s) for the excitement that playing with the demo just gave me. Buried under all those years of coding standards this rekindled some of the feelings from the kid in me that would eagerly look forward to the next issue of E.T.I. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronics_Today_International]E.T.I http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronics_Today_International....

wdewind 16y ago
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?
- JonnieCache 16y ago
  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.
  - wdewind 16y ago
    I honestly can't tell if you are being serious or not. If you are: expand on "obvious usefulness." If you aren't, congrats on telling a joke on HN and still getting upvoted.
    - JonnieCache 16y ago
      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. Just imagine it on an ecommerce page: http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=shoes&hl=en&show=li&lnk=showgrid http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=shoes&hl=en&show=... 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.
      - gfodor 16y ago
        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!
  - moe 16y ago
    As someone who made the purchase (proof: the license is a pdf/txt) I couldn't have said it better. Isotope promises to be a goldmine for experimentation and exploration.
- michaelbuckbee 16y ago
  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.
  - wdewind 16y ago
    Right - my question is who needs this kind of behavior? And why?
    - Tycho 16y ago
      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.
      - notque 16y ago
        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)
        Tycho 16y ago
        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.
        notque 16y ago
- bergie 16y ago
  Curious, first time I see something non-free on GitHub
- matthew-wegner 16y ago
  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 http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/relayout.html).
- skybrian 16y ago
  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.

wdewind 16y ago

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?

JonnieCache 16y ago
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.
- wdewind 16y ago
  I honestly can't tell if you are being serious or not. If you are: expand on "obvious usefulness." If you aren't, congrats on telling a joke on HN and still getting upvoted.
  - JonnieCache 16y ago
    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. Just imagine it on an ecommerce page: http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=shoes&hl=en&show=li&lnk=showgrid http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=shoes&hl=en&show=... 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.
    - gfodor 16y ago
      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!
- moe 16y ago
  As someone who made the purchase (proof: the license is a pdf/txt) I couldn't have said it better. Isotope promises to be a goldmine for experimentation and exploration.
michaelbuckbee 16y ago
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.
- wdewind 16y ago
  Right - my question is who needs this kind of behavior? And why?
  - Tycho 16y ago
    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.
    - notque 16y ago
      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)
      - Tycho 16y ago
        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.
        notque 16y ago
bergie 16y ago
Curious, first time I see something non-free on GitHub
matthew-wegner 16y ago
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 http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/relayout.html).
skybrian 16y ago
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.