
JQuery pageSlide: throwing content around - ajbatac
http://ajaxian.com/archives/jquery-pageslide-throwing-content-around#
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jbarciauskas
It breaks horizontal scrolling! That's unacceptable. What's the use case for
this?

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Jebdm
I'd be willing to bet that most people don't encounter horizontal scrolling on
a regular basis. At least I sure hope not; it's hella annoying. The only cases
where I can think of it coming up (for a full page, at least) is when there is
an over-sized image or on the occasional artsy site where it's designed that
way intentionally. Perhaps horizontal scrolling comes up more often for people
using small screens--on a netbook or phone or something--but even then I
imagine it's fairly rare.

The use case? Inline comments, feedback boxes, contact info, control panels,
really anything you want to have immediately available but out of the way most
of the time. Is this the best way to implement those? Not always, of course,
but probably enough to warrant its existence.

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jbarciauskas
Oh I hate horizontal scrolling, but it seems odd that the contents of the page
are shifted to the left in the demo without any clear way to shift back. Maybe
I missed something, but that's usually an indication of a poor UI paradigm.
And I'm not arguing it shouldn't exist, just commenting that it's usefulness
isn't immediately obvious. More choices are always good though!

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Jebdm
Ah, that's what you meant. You just have to click on the original page to
shift it back. It was intuitive to me, but I can definitely see people not
realizing it. You're right, they should definitely indicate how to get back in
some way.

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trickjarrett
Pretty slick looking, will still need some development to make use more
intuitive. Like there's no clear sign that I just click back in the main area
to return to focus.

I can't wait to see where it goes though.

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sam_in_nyc
Untrue. When stuck, users click. Takes 1 time to learn: "click for it to go
away."

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jasonkester
Ah, but in this implementation, clicking on the new content doesn't make it go
away. It's really not intuitive for a first time user (like me for instance).

We actually used this effect inside of Twiddla for a while, with universally
bad user response. Ditched it in favor of boring lightbox-style pseudo popups.

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sam_in_nyc
I just tried out Twiddla, it's really cool, congrats.

As per this slide-in UI, I'm going to change my mind here and say you're
right. It really is kind of pointless... it's the same thing as a lightbox,
only vertical, and more disruptive and disorienting.

I do think there could be some use for it... maybe someone will make a twitter
app that uses it.. twitslide perhaps.. and we can all be amazed that they did
it in x hours just as a side project.

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jasonkester
It amazes me that people think that a silly 5 line DHTML effect deserves this
sort of attention.

We were capable of doing this just as easily and just as cross-platform in
1996. Why is it news today?

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jeresig
So you were capable of doing this in IE3? I'd pay money to see that.

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jasonkester
IE4. Yes.

You just needed to remember to use DIVs for IE and Layers for Netscape 3. This
sort of thing was actually easier back then.

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jasonkester
This thread made me all nostalgic for the early days of DHTML, so I went back
and resurrected my old IE4/NN3 Joust Clone:

<http://www.jasonkester.com/joust/>

For the record, that was 1998, not 1996, so I was off by a couple years in my
earlier remark. I've taken the liberty of updating it so that it works in
FireFox and Chrome now. (Sadly, sacrificing the document.all and
document.Layers action that made it so great!)

