Isotope - An exquisite jQuery plugin for magical layouts

If you go back to the homepage, he's offering the plugin for commercial use for $37. I like this idea of monetizing the use of plugins, especially ones so well-built. (He's also offering direct support for $17, another interesting idea.)

moe4• 15 years ago

$37 is a joke. I just purchased it b̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶i̶z̶e̶s̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶r̶g̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶r̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶a̶g̶n̶i̶t̶u̶d̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ to support further development of this gem.

Deal-Tracker2• 15 years ago

I agree. I was happy to see such a reasonable price for this great plugin. Thanks for sharing!

slantyyz• 15 years ago

$37 is a joke

Indeed. It's such a frictionless purchase that he'll be laughing all the way to the bank.

shrikant• 15 years ago

That's a lot of hard work to substitute for the 'strikethru' tag :)

fredleblanc2• 15 years ago

I'm not really commenting on the price chosen, but the choice to charge for it. I've also created a jQuery plugin or two. I released it for free and now spend a reasonable amount of time answering questions about support, implementation, etc.

For some reason in my mind I had always assumed that open source type things have to be done for free: the building, the support, etc. Seeing someone doing something others helps put that in perspective.

Or, in short: I wish I was smarter about it and more business-savvy.

Tycho4• 15 years ago

Fantastic. With stuff like this I can see web-app interfaces surpassing (Mac) desktop applications. You might argue they already have, visually, but here the responsiveness is particularly impressive while the complexity is ramped up a bit.

JonnieCache4• 15 years ago

Very nice! It's a more up to date version of http://razorjack.net/quicksand/

Deal-Tracker2• 15 years ago

Also very helpful. This one seems to have some different features regarding hiding/showing elements. Great stuff!

infocaptor• 15 years ago

really cool. Developing web apps is becoming like a no-brainer. Who builds for desktop when you can create the same responsiveness in a web app.

moe4• 15 years ago

Brilliant.

NathanKP3• 15 years ago

Isotope is fairly nice, but it is still missing fluid width on the layout elements. In other words, although it does respond fairly well to horizontal resizing of the browser, it still doesn't do a good job of dynamically adjusting the width of elements horizontally while at the same time stacking them vertically.

I made some custom modifications on the original jQuery masonry plugin to get the effect I needed for my upcoming web app. You can preview it at http://test.bookflavor.com (This is an in-development sneak preview so don't expect everything to work perfectly, but you will be able to preview my personal modification of the jQuery masonry plugin.)

allenp• 15 years ago

Wow I'm really impressed with the layout and how clean it all is.

NathanKP3• 15 years ago

Thanks allenp. I hope to finish a few last features and get it released soon, but I'm at a bit of a low point right now, and finding it hard to finish a few final details with my attention diverted towards other paying jobs and issues in my life.

jeisenberg• 15 years ago

This site looks great. Seriously, well done.

NathanKP3• 15 years ago

Thanks. I'm glad you like it. I have been feeling quite depressed of late, and a little demotivated about the site, so your positive feedback means a lot to me, and boosts me to get back to work and finish those last few features that are needed.

chewbranca• 15 years ago

This looks interesting. I've been using his masonry plugin for quite a while now and its worked out very well. Excited to see that masonry appears to hook into isotope as well.

krosaen• 15 years ago

very cool. for those interested, a similar plugin is jquery quicksand http://razorjack.net/quicksand

sfphotoarts• 15 years ago

I hate to make such a banal comment, but when I see things like this I cannot wait to redesign my website and use this ultra-cool technologies. After programming for 25 years I am grateful to this plugin and the developer(s) for the excitement that playing with the demo just gave me. Buried under all those years of coding standards this rekindled some of the feelings from the kid in me that would eagerly look forward to the next issue of E.T.I. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronics_Today_International....

wdewind3• 15 years ago

This seems like a neat plugin, but I don't understand all the mega excitement.

What am I missing, why is this so earth shattering (read the other comments in this thread)? What is justifying people saying $37 is a "frictionless" price?

What are you planning to do that makes you so excited by this?

JonnieCache4• 15 years ago

I think its a combination of the obvious usefulness of this code, combined with the impeccable execution and presentation, combined with its effective employment of bleeding edge technologies. It's basically a "perfect storm" of frontend library awesomeness.

michaelbuckbee• 15 years ago

My thought was that if you need this type of behavior on your site $37 dollars is much less expensive than the amount of time it would take for you to pull all the elements of this together yourself.

bergie• 15 years ago

Curious, first time I see something non-free on GitHub

matthew-wegner• 15 years ago

I've been meaning to update my photography portfolio, which would be a great use for this. The "relayout" demo is quite engaging--I played with it for a good 15+ seconds, which is a long time to interact with anything lacking content (http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/relayout.html).

skybrian• 15 years ago

After playing with it a bit, I'm guessing it would be most useful for image galleries that contain a lot of irregularly sized images and you want to fit a lot of them on the screen. Or something like Google Image Search.

anigbrowl• 15 years ago

Beautiful. The individual demos are also very impressive. The only thing I didn't really get was the variable sizes option, where the sizes seemed kind of arbitrary (for example on the elements demo, I expected it to be proportional to something, such as the abundance of the element).

Small note, on Chrome (d10) the option highlights on the Elements Complete demo are broken. Buttons still work but the highlight doesn't update correctly.

cemregr• 15 years ago

Dave DeSandro is a web development genius.

netmau5• 15 years ago

Very very cool and I even have something to use it on!

neovive• 15 years ago

Very interesting library. I see some interesting use cases for photos and media browsing. It would be interesting to hear some other suggested use cases where this plugin can be applied over existing solutions.

MaxGfeller• 15 years ago

Looks awesome, trying to find something where i can use that.

crizCraig• 15 years ago

I love how it works with the page zoom.

Geee• 15 years ago

How does it run on lower spec computers or devices like iPad? I'm just wondering where the line should be drawn when considering the website performance/user experience.

Tycho4• 15 years ago

Works fine on iPad. In fact the graphics in the demos make me think this would be perfect for recreating the Star Trek 'tablets'.

prawn• 15 years ago

My laptop is 6-7 years old and it isn't overly slick for me, but not so bad that it'd be a huge concern. Definitely worth testing depending on how many items you're looking to incorporate though.

jp_sc• 15 years ago

Nice. I did something very similar, as an experiment, even before jQuery Masonry, but never released it. I should've known better.

KevBurnsJr• 15 years ago

The buttons on the site are broken. The click events are all waiting for page load which is taking 20 seconds due to an unrelated request timeout for a javascript resource from a different domain. Probably some sort of analytics.

Same thing has been caused by ads on pastie.org lately http://pastie.org/1538368

Especially if you have blocking embedded links to resources that are not in your control.

asdfadjoin• 15 years ago

This is Sridhar

lucasr• 15 years ago

Pretty nice plugin. The transitions look a bit choppy on Firefox 3.6. Very smooth on Chrome.

battlehorse• 15 years ago

Very interesting library, I'd like to suggest another similar alternative : Rhizosphere, http://site.rhizospherejs.com (demos at http://www.rhizospherejs.com ).

Compared with Isotope, I think it has some extra features, but also is still missing something.

Isotope - An exquisite jQuery plugin for magical layouts

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