Animating VueJS with Sarah Drasner

Most user interfaces that we interact with are not animated. We click on a button, and a form blinks into view. We click a link and the page abruptly changes.

On the other hand, when we interact with an application that has animations, we can feel the difference. The animations are often subtle. If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, pay attention the next time you use Slack or Facebook Messenger or iMessage. Airbnb values animation so much that they built Lottie, a library for animation.

In an animated application, the user interface feels alive. When a software team takes the time to build animations into small interactions, the user perceives the animations as polish and attention to detail.

Sarah Drasner has been evangelizing the value of animations for years, and she is an expert at implementing complex and beautiful animations on the web. She works at Microsoft as a developer advocate and joins the show to talk about how to build animations. If you are building a web application and want to create a unique UI, you might find this show useful.

JavaScript supports detailed animations, often through the manipulation of SVG files. SVG stands for “scalable vector graphics” a file format that represents an image in its own DOM. SVG is so flexible because of this DOM format, which defines the different parts of the SVG. This is in contrast to a bitmap, which is just a simple matrix of dots, without any rich metadata.

You could manipulate SVG with raw JavaScript—but most people use a frontend JavaScript framework like React, Angular, or VueJS. Sarah has been implementing most of her recent web animations using Vue, and she is a member of the Vue core team.

Vue has an entertaining story, because it gained popularity in a time when Google was supporting AngularJS and Facebook was supporting ReactJS. The first version of Vue was created from scratch by a single developer, Evan You.

If you are a Vue developer looking for an open source project to hack on, you can check out softwaredaily.com, which is an open source platform to consume content about software. In addition to the Vue web app, we also have the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and for Android. All of these apps are open-sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily. If you are looking for an open source project to get involved with, we would love to get your help.

Transcript

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