• Added ‘centeredX’ and ‘centeredY’ options.
• Removed ‘hideUntilReady’ option. It looks pretty bad if you don’t hide the image until it’s fully loaded.
• Fixed IE img onload bug.
• Now supports iPhone/iPad orientation changes.

Many thanks to Peter Baker for providing the code to center the images.

Download Backstretch Now

A recent Weightshift project, Central, brought about a few development challenges, one of which was background imagery. Naz had designed the page to include photography set behind the content. This raised questions:

• How would we deal with the additional weight of the images (~150–250K) without dragging down the page’s load time?
• Everyone’s browser window will be a different size. How do you determine what is the best/largest size to make the image, so that it fills the entire window?
• How do you account for images that are proportioned differently?

I did some research and found a few good solutions, though each had its limitations.

CSS-based solutions were straightforward, but didn’t address the requirement of triggering the download only after the page was ready. Javascript solutions addressed the page load requirement, but were often more complex than we needed and required the user to have prior knowledge of the image size (something that we couldn’t necessarily predict). The final solution was not novel, it was an amalgam of both solutions, implemented in Javascript.

Backstretch is a simple plugin recreated from the code used on Central, derived from the ideas presented in existing CSS and JS solutions. It is meant to be used by those who want a lightweight, minimalist implementation of dynamically-resized background images that can be executed in one line of Javascript, with nothing more than a link to an image.

Download Backstretch

• Choose slide direction (left or right)
• Custom width slides
• Modal slides
• unobtrusive
• Mutiple slide definitions on the same page
• Fully supported with IE7+, FireFox 2+, Safari 2+
• Minified version included!

Link

Nowadays, it might be accurate to say that screen real estate is worth more than actual real estate.

As web developers, we spend precious time laying out our pages, using every UI concept in the book to conserve space, while trying to maintain a user's focus on the task at hand. There are many techniques to use — Lightbox, Carousel and Tabs to name a few — and today I hope to offer up another: jQuery PageSlide.

jQuery PageSlide was inspired by the UI work of Aza Raskin. In his recent posts regarding concepts for Firefox Mobile and a mouse-based Ubiquity, Aza introduced the idea of sliding (or "throwing") content aside to reveal a secondary content pane.

This plugin allows any developer to recreate a similar interaction on their own website using a few simple lines of Javascript. By attaching the method to an anchor tag, PageSlide adds the ability to move your page and display a secondary interaction pane. The slide is animated whenever the click event is invoked.

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function() {
        $('a').pageslide();
    });
</script>

Similar to Lightbox, PageSlide has two major advantages:

1. The primary window is reserved for content; secondary interactions do not require additional space on the page — the area they need is created and removed on demand.
2. Because the user can see the original window, they have a greater likelihood of retaining focus, and can easily return to the previous task.

Can I See It In Action?

Of course, you can! Click for a PageSlide demo.

Where Do I Get It?

I've setup a GitHub project for jquery-pageslide.