Our solar system - A Webkit Animation using CSS3

http://neography.com/experiment/circles/solarsystem/

by nico_h • 16 years ago

37 35 16 years ago

neography.com

nico_h• 16 years ago

Works smoothly in Safari on a macbook air.

zengenuity• 16 years ago

Also on an iPhone 3G. Text is small, but the animation smooth and not slower than on my Macbook.

Batsu• 16 years ago

I'm not sure I would call it smooth in Chrome on Windows 7, and this is on a gaming PC (more or less). The process was also using 25% CPU, which I believe Process Explorer would report as one full core.

papertiger• 16 years ago

Not so smooth on Chrome/Ubuntu (on Mac hardware) either.

Cool experiment.

iaskwhy• 16 years ago

Not smooth at all when you scroll.

It plays nicely on iPhone 2G but scrolling and zooming make it hang for a while, I even made the animation stop somehow.

I'm not sure this is the way to go...

rauljara• 16 years ago

Neat. Anyone know if there's a good way to do elliptical orbits using CSS3?

xhuang• 16 years ago

i think you can change the border radius to get different shape out of your element box(top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right corners).

http://www.css3.info/preview/rounded-border/

yankeeracer73• 16 years ago

The processor fan started up on my Macbook Pro 17" just like it does when I use Flash for more than 5 seconds. How ironical. :)

jim-greer• 16 years ago

This has improved in 10.1, finally.

jws• 16 years ago

Odd. Desktop iMac, older Core 2 version, it only takes me from my background 2% cpu use to 7% cpu use. Perhaps it is making heavy use of the GPU, which I wouldn't see in the cpu usage stats. (I add: using Safari.)

sirn• 16 years ago

Oddly, it use 100% of one of my i7 iMac core when running on Chrome (6.0.408.1). However, the animation play very smooth with only 1~2% CPU usage when running on Safari (4.0.5 6531.22.7).

So I assume you're using Chrome?

Edit: -webkit-animation in general seems to be very slow in Chrome.

Edit again: Oh right, -webkit-animation is hardware-accelerated in Safari. http://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/#comment-25071

swannodette2• 16 years ago

Huh. I have a new 13" Macbook Pro and my CPU is at 5%-8% in Safari.

However Google Chrome does not look like it hardware accelerates CSS animations so it's eating up 90% CPU on this.

hackermom3• 16 years ago

Odd. My 2.26ghz 13" MB Pro puts Safari at under 10% CPU usage for this; the CPU doesn't even clock over 1ghz running it.

X-Istence• 16 years ago

Works well on my MacBook Pro 2.4 Ghz, Safari went from 0.0 %CPU used to 10.0 used, not bad. Flash tends use much more than that.

cpr2• 16 years ago

It looks like only Apple has hooked up WebKit animation to an underlying Core Animation-equivalent layer in the OS which uses the GPU for most of the hard work.

Not sure if Google is really motivated to do this kind of system-specific work in Chrome beyond the basic port.

swannodette2• 16 years ago

I would argue that they should be. CSS is well understood by designers/programmers and doing animations all in JS is error prone and off course a CPU hog. Hardware acceleration is particularly important when you're talking about devices with underpowered CPUs (Android). On my iPad/iPhone CSS animations outperform JS animations by a ridiculous margin.

cpr2• 16 years ago

Just to clarify, they do have the CSS-based animations, since they're WebKit-based, but they're just not hooked up to an underlying hardware-based implementation.

hackermom3• 16 years ago

Does anyone know what the belt of "scraps" between Mars and Jupiter is? Is there another "Kuiper belt" of sorts sitting right outside Mars?

mapleoin• 16 years ago

yup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System#Asteroid_belt

BoppreH2• 16 years ago

Chrome eats CPU like there's no tomorrow and the frame rate is around 15. Firefox doesn't even animate it.

Seriously, what is the point of this demos? It's like that Star Wars movie in ASCII. Interesting, but not very useful.

hackermom3• 16 years ago

Perhaps a good spurring for everyone else than Apple to pick up pace and get with implementing specifications for their browsers.

BoppreH2• 16 years ago

I wasn't referring to the implementations, but this new wave of CSS3/HTML5 demos doing nothing that could solve a real-world problem.

Sure, I'd like all browsers to have a correct implementation of this technologies, I'm just questioning this type of demo. In the end they are just a fancy ACID-like test and frankly, we already have more than enough for this use.

icefox• 16 years ago

As cool as this is Neptune and Pluto orbits are wrong. They cross each others paths.

ugh• 16 years ago

They should have just left out Pluto altogether. It’s not a planet. They could have put in the Kupier belt like they put in the asteroid belt.

joblessjunkie2• 16 years ago

    -webkit-border-radius: 20px;
    -moz-border-radius: 20px;
    border-radius: 20px;

Really? Is this what we have to look forward to in CSS for the coming decade?

daleharvey2• 16 years ago

no, they will just be dropped when there is a standard syntax

joblessjunkie2• 16 years ago

But old browsers are forever.... witness IE6

alabut2• 16 years ago

This is a great demonstration of why to use CSS3 animations - Flash doesn't support the concept of graceful degradation. This page turns into a static image in Firefox/Mac instead of borking out with a blue lego piece.

Mgreen• 16 years ago

I really appreciate the effort that has gone into building the demo. But i disagree with you.It is extremely easy for developers to provide fallback content when Flash is not availble.

As a developer, here is why i(personally) wont choose CSS3 animations for building similar content anytime in the near future:

-Works only on webkit browsers

-Performance is really bad on Chrome. Compared to most of the heavy weight flash content out there, this is just a very basic animation.

alabut2• 16 years ago

"It is extremely easy for developers to provide fallback content when Flash is not availble."

Really? How? I was an actionscripter for years before I dropped Flash from my arsenal and worked at a game company that would've loved to provide their games on systems without Flash.

jheriko• 16 years ago

Its interesting, just a shame it works for nobody... er webkit users only and even then it looks glitchy (I used Chrome).

fredoliveira• 16 years ago

give it a try in safari. I think you'll be amazed.

mturmon• 16 years ago

Here's a static picture of the same thing, but much more accurate and inclusive:

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?orbits

e.g.,

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?ss_inner

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?ss_distant

Our solar system - A Webkit Animation using CSS3

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