Cloud 9 Carousel

A 3D perspective carousel for jQuery/Zepto focused on performance, based on the original Cloud Carousel by Professor Cloud.

Features

• Works with jQuery and Zepto
• Extremely fast
• Easy to use
• (optional) Reflections (via reflection.js)
• (optional) Mouse wheel support (via mousewheel plugin) (see: known issues)
• (optional) Rotate clicked item to front
• (optional) Auto-play
• Smooth animation via requestAnimationFrame with fixed-FPS fallback mode
• GPU acceleration through CSS transforms (support detected automatically)
• Create multiple instances
• Items can be any HTML element
• Convenient event callbacks

Demos

See the examples in the gh-pages branch.

Dependencies

• jQuery 1.3.0 or later or Zepto 1.1.1 or later
• Optional mirror effect using the reflection.js plugin by Christophe Beyls (jQuery only)
• Optional mouse wheel support via the mousewheel plugin (jQuery only)

Documentation

Basic usage

HTML:

<div id="carousel">
  <img class="cloud9-item" src="images/1.png" alt="Item #1">
  <img class="cloud9-item" src="images/2.png" alt="Item #2">
  <img class="cloud9-item" src="images/3.png" alt="Item #3">
  <img class="cloud9-item" src="images/4.png" alt="Item #4">
  <img class="cloud9-item" src="images/5.png" alt="Item #5">
  <img class="cloud9-item" src="images/6.png" alt="Item #6">
</div>
 
<div id="buttons">
  <button class="left">
    ←
  </button>
  <button class="right">
    →
  </button>
</div>

CSS:

#carousel .cloud9-item, #buttons button {
  cursor: pointer;
}

JavaScript:

$("#carousel").Cloud9Carousel( {
  buttonLeft: $("#buttons > .left"),
  buttonRight: $("#buttons > .right"),
  autoPlay: 1,
  bringToFront: true
} );

Carousel options

You may pass these options to the carousel constructor. Some of these properties may be changed during runtime via the data handle.

Option	Description	Default
xOrigin	Center of the carousel (x coordinate)	(container width / 2)
yOrigin	Center of the carousel (y coordinate)	(container height / 10)
xRadius	Half the width of the carousel	(container width / 2.3)
yRadius	Half the height of the carousel	(container height / 6)
farScale	Scale of an item at its farthest point (range: 0 to 1)	0.5
mirror	See: Reflection options	none
transforms	Use native CSS transforms if support for them is detected	true
smooth	Use maximum effective frame rate via the requestAnimationFrame API if support is detected	true
fps	Frames per second (if smooth animation is turned off)	30
speed	Relative speed factor of the carousel. Any positive number: 1 is slow, 4 is medium, 10 is fast. Adjust to your liking	4
autoPlay	Automatically rotate the carousel by this many items periodically (positive number is clockwise). Auto-play is not performed while the mouse hovers over the carousel container. A value of 0 means auto-play is turned off. See: autoPlayDelay	0
autoPlayDelay	Delay, in milliseconds, between auto-play spins	4000
mouseWheel	Spin the carousel using the mouse wheel. Requires a "mousewheel" event, provided by this mousewheel plugin. However, see: known issues	false
bringToFront	Clicking an item will rotate it to the front	false
buttonLeft	jQuery collection of element(s) intended to spin the carousel so as to bring the item to the left of the frontmost item to the front, i.e., spin it counterclockwise, when clicked. E.g., $("#button-left")	none
buttonRight	jQuery collection of element(s) intended to spin the carousel so as to bring the item to the right of the frontmost item to the front, i.e., spin it clockwise, when clicked. E.g., $("#button-right")	none
itemClass	Class attribute of the item elements inside the carousel container	"cloud9-item"
frontItemClass	Class attribute automatically added to the front-most item element	none
handle	The string handle you can use to interact with the carousel. E.g., $("#carousel").data("carousel").go(1)	"carousel"

Reflection options

After including reflection.js in your page, you may pass in options to configure the item reflections. For example:

mirror: {
  gap: 12,     /* 12 pixel gap between item and reflection */
  height: 0.2, /* 20% of item height */
  opacity: 0.4 /* 40% opacity at the top */
}

Note: The reflection.js plugin does not work with Zepto, but this unofficial fork does!

Option	Description	Default
gap	Vertical gap in pixels between the bottom of the item (at full size) and the top of its reflection	2
height	The height of the reflection relative to the height of the item (range: 0 to 1)	1/3
opacity	Opacity of the reflection at its top (most visible part) (range: 0 to 1)	0.5

Carousel methods

The following methods can be called on the carousel object after initialisation. For example:

// Spin three items clockwise
$("#carousel").data("carousel").go( 3 );

Basic methods:

Method	Description	Arguments
go( count )	Spin the carousel	count: Number of carousel items to rotate (+ is clockwise, - is counterclockwise)
goTo( index )	Spin the carousel to a specific item	index: Index of the carousel item to rotate to
nearestIndex()	Returns the 0-based index of the item nearest to the front (integer)	none
nearestItem()	Returns a reference to the item object of the item that is nearest to the front (Item object)	none
deactivate()	Disable the carousel (currently irreversible). You can use that in order to halt the carousel mechanism and free the carousel's elements from it. Then the elements can be manipulated without interference from the carousel plugin. See for example, when you click to expand the gallery.	none

Advanced methods:

Method	Description	Arguments
itemsRotated()	Returns the interpolated number of items rotated from the initial zero position. In a carousel with 5 items that made three clockwise revolutions, the value will be -15. If the carousel then further spins half-way to the next item, then the value would be -15.5 (float)	none
floatIndex()	Returns an interpolated value of the item "index" at the front of the carousel. If, for example, the carousel was 20% past item 2 toward the next item, then floatIndex() would return 2.2 (float)	none

Event callbacks

Callback functions may be passed to the carousel constructor along with the options. For example:

// Hide carousel while items are loading
$("#carousel").css( 'visibility', 'hidden' ).Cloud9Carousel( {
  bringToFront: true,
  onLoaded: function( carousel ) {
    // Show carousel
    $(carousel).css( 'visibility', 'visible' );
    alert( 'Carousel is ready!' );
  },
  onRendered: function( carousel ) {
    var item = $(carousel).data("carousel").nearestItem();
    console.log( "Item closest to the front: " + $(item).attr("alt") );
  }
} );

Callback	Description
onLoaded	Fires once when the carousel has completely initialised
onRendered	Fires each time after a frame has finished calculating
onAnimationFinished	Fires when the carousel has finished spinning

Further questions?

Please check what's been asked. If not, take your time and ask a good one.

Authors

• Upgrades by Ildar Sagdejev
• Forked from CloudCarousel v1.0.5 by Professor Cloud (R. Cecco)

Known issues

• Due to lack of standartisation, "mousewheel" scrolling is extremely sensitive and unmanageable when using some track pads (such as on the MacBook Pro). Unfortunately, since there appears to be no way to know directly what type of device is triggering the mousewheel events, it is not trivial to somehow normalise or "tame" the input from the track pad without also affecting the "1 tick per click" behaviour of the standard mouse wheel. darsain has described the same phenomenon in this discussion at the sly.js project. Ideas are appreciated.

License

MIT