I just did a little clean up and released Fx.SmoothMove. This functionality used to be a part of Element.setPosition but now it’s an extension to Fx.Styles.

Mootools has a convention that I was breaking here (the same reason prompted me moving Fx.SmoothShow into Fx and out of Element). Basically, it is a general rule in the Mootools dev team never to create one-off instance of classes, especially in Native object extensions (Element in particular). Element.setPosition had an option (smoothMove: true) that would transition the position of the element to the new location smoothly (i.e. using Fx.Styles). But it didn’t return this to you, so every time you used it you created a new instance of Fx.Styles. Aside from this being wasteful, it also means that if you attempt to do this behavior while another is still in process, instead of canceling the previous one and starting a new one, both would run, causing your element to jump around until they both finished.

This is bad form and I should be given three lashes or something. I figured all this out after I’d written a lot of it and have just now gotten around to cleaning it up. But hey, as long as we all learned something… right?

See Fx.SmoothMove in action.

Update: I keep switching out Fx.SmoothShow and Fx.SmoothMove; this note as about the latter… Fixed the typos…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 7:24 pm and is filed under CNET JS Standards, Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.