In a follow-up to the last article which described Adding swipe actions to a web site, I’ll show how to add simple animation to give some user feedback that the swipe has happened.

First of all, we’ll modify the JavaScript to add a single line as follows:

mc.on('swipe', (ev) => {
  const dir = (ev.deltaX < 0) ? 'next' : 'prev'
  const a = document.getElementById(dir)
  if (a) {

    // Added line for animation:
    document.body.classList.add('animate-' + dir)

    window.location = a.href
  }
})

So, just before loading in the new page this code adds a CSS class animate-next or animate-prev to the body element of the page (i.e. to the entire page). This will trigger an animation that will run while waiting for the new page to load.

To actually cause the animation we add the following CSS:

  @keyframes slideLeft {
    to {
      transform: translateX(100%);
      opacity: 0;
    }
  }
  @keyframes slideRight {
    to {
      transform: translateX(-100%);
      opacity: 0;
    }
  }
  .animate-prev {
    animation: 0.2s ease-out 0s 1 slideLeft;
  }
  .animate-next {
    animation: 0.2s ease-out 0s 1 slideRight;
  }

Let’s walk through this:

  1. Each @keyframes includes a single to (100%) key-frame which is the state to animate to. Because there is no from (0%) key-frame the animation will default to using the current state as the starting state. It
    • translates 100% to the left or right (which for the body will translate it offscreen)
    • fades from opaque to transparent.
  2. Each class selector has an animation that uses the corresponding key-frame, specifying that it should animate
    • over the given time
    • using ease-out (start fast then slow down)
    • with no delay
    • playing just once
    • the given #keyframes name

Note we are careful to only use High Performance Animations that can be efficiently implemented by a phone’s GPU, namely translation, scaling, rotation, or opacity change. We could obviously use these four types of animations to further enhance the page-swiping animation to make it more effective, while still keeping it efficient.