Note: This project is not being developed further at the moment. I hope to return to it soon.
SamsaraJS is a library for building continuous user interfaces. A continuous UI is one where many visual elements are animating in coordinated ways. For example, you may want to fade the opacity of a nav bar while a settings menu is translated by a user's swipe gesture. Or maybe you want to blur and scale a banner image when a user scrolls some content past its limits, and add a springy bounce at the end.
Building these interactions and maintaining performance is hard, and SamsaraJS is here to help. It supports
- 3D transforms and perspective (all hardware accelerated)
- natural physics-based transitions like springs and inertia along with tweens
- user input for mouse and touch along with gestures like pinch, scale, and rotate
- a stream-based architecture for coordinating animations
SamsaraJS is opinionated about presentation, but has no opinions about content. It moves rectangles around the screen — what you do inside them is up to you. There is no support for routing, server syncing, templating, data-binding, etc. There are many other frameworks for those needs, and Samsara is designed to be friends with them.
Getting Started
Resources | |
---|---|
Guide | samsaraJS.org/docs |
API docs | samsaraJS.org/reference_docs |
Questions | SamsaraJS Google Group |
Examples
Example | Demo (fullscreen) | Description |
---|---|---|
Logo | demo • docs | The SamsaraJS logo |
Cube | demo • docs | 3D spinning cube with animated size |
ParallaxCats | demo • docs | Scrollview of cat images that parallax with the scroll |
Carousel | demo • docs | A paginated scrollview converted into a slideshow with previous/next buttons |
SideMenu | demo • docs | A navigation UI with an exposed side drawer |
Safari Tabs | demo • docs | A scrollview imitating the mobile Safari tab viewer |
Installation
SamsaraJS requires a small CSS file located at dist/samsara.css
or samsara/samsara.css
. For all of the installation methods below, you will also need to include this CSS file for SamsaraJS to work properly.
Git
Clone this repo
git clone [email protected]:dmvaldman/samsara.git
You'll find AMD modules in the samsara
directory, CommonJS bundles in the dist
directory, examples in the examples
directory and reference documentation in the docs
directory.
NPM
Install the CommonJS build of Samsara with
npm install samsarajs
This will provide a bundled Samsara
object. Note there is a case-difference: path keys are capitalized for CommonJS but lowercase for AMD.
var Surface = require('samsara/dom/Surface'); // AMD var Surface = require('samsarajs').DOM.Surface; // CommonJS
The samsara.css
file will also be included in node_modules/samsarajs/dist/samsara.css
.
Window Object
Copy dist/samsara.js
and include it as a source file. Samsara
will then be accessible through window.Samsara
. This is particularly useful for sharing on sites like jsFiddle, CodePen, etc.
Yeoman Generator
A generator was made by @richardkopelow. This is an easy way to get started if you're comfortable with yeoman. Follow the installation instructions here.