
Real Shadow: jQuery Plugin that casts photorealistic shadows - illdave
http://indamix.github.com/real-shadow/
======
aw3c2
Maybe it is the amount of shadow-casting items on that page but if your
___landing page_ __maxes out my cpu and lags badly, I say goodbye faster than
20 frames render. (I use Opera.)

edit: They do look good though!

------
mxfh
This one even had lights. Illuminated.js – 2D lights and shadows rendering
engine for HTML5 applications <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3958251>

------
Cushman
The effect is cool, so I hate to ask this, but-- in what sense is this
"photorealistic"? They look like normal soft shadows to me.

~~~
vph
in a marketing sense.

~~~
Cushman
The normal computer graphics meaning, then.

------
hamoid
Where is the cursor on my phone? :)

------
evride
"Perfect for eye-catching demos and landing pages."

Can we stop creating stuff in JS/CSS that we would have ridiculed other people
for doing in flash? I can't possibly think of any situation where this would
be useful for a landing page.

~~~
Cushman
Flash wasn't ridiculed because of how it looked. The principle of integrating
interactive content into web pages is a fine one, so long as it's done in a
way that's semantically consistent, machine readable, searchable, accessible,
reliable, not too obtrusive, forgiving of network latency and performance,
cross-platform, cross-device, and tolerant of errors -- the web, in other
words. Flash was... not.

That doesn't mean we stop trying to make web pages look prettier.

------
alttab
This pegged my duo core at 100% for both cores. Realtime shadows are great and
all, but if I needed to achieve them I'd imagine I'd use WebGL if I didn't
care about CPU or battery.

Using jQuery for this type of problem seems a little out of place to me. That
said, this is certainly "neat." THAT said, I don't believe this has real world
practical value. Its too computationally expensive considering what it adds.

~~~
jmah
I'd use WebGL if I _did_ care about CPU and battery.

------
ddon
On iPad I see shadows, but can't control them...

------
ars
I moved the cursor across the page and nothing of interest happened. This is
Firefox 12. It did work on chrome though.

~~~
KwanEsq
Do you have NoScript or similar? Even with scripts enabled it doesn't work for
me, because of the mimetype: "[NoScript] Blocking nosniff Javascript served
from [https://raw.github.com/Indamix/real-
shadow/master/realshadow...](https://raw.github.com/Indamix/real-
shadow/master/realshadow.js) with wrong type info text/plain, inline and
included by <http://indamix.github.com/real-shadow/>

Edit: the fix is to add <https://raw.github.com/> to the pref
noscript.inclusionTypeChecking.exceptions in about:config

~~~
ars
Yup. Although I did switch it to "allow scripts globally", but I guess that's
not enough.

And, sorry, but I'm not going to add that to about config.

------
jgv
My company released this effect a couple of months ago:
<http://okfoc.us/okshadow/> and <https://github.com/okfocus/okshadow>

------
illdave
Just to confirm, it's working well on Chrome 20 on Mac for me (no lag, not
maxing out the CPU, very smooth). It's interesting from a technical
perspective, although design-wise I can't really see any practical reason to
use it. Fun though.

------
PhrosTT
2000 - drop shadows.

2005 - transparent drop shadows.

2012 - realtime drop shadows!

------
basseq
It may just be for demo purposes, but using the mouse cursor as a light source
seems like the 2012 equivalent of animated GIF backgrounds. Might be cool it
could you specify a point light source at a given coordinate and let the page
render from there.

~~~
iambot
You can. if you read the github readme, is shows clearly how to both disable
the mouseFollow and set a global light source.

------
asto
Works quite nicely on Chrome. Too much lag on Firefox and Opera!

------
lucian1900
Works on FF 12, but it's extremely slow.

~~~
petepete
Beautifully smooth for me, with Chrome 20 on Linux.

------
jheriko
FYI doesn't work with IE 10

------
regnum
Looks very nice in Chrome.

------
happypeter
ubuntu1104+Chrome: perfect Mac+firefox13: a bit slow

------
savories
Needs more lens flare. And some bevels. Then we're back in 1998.

------
riotgibbon
well, I liked it, well done

