Opportunity can be ignited at any given moment, even when you're doing something as simple as a design exercise. And that opportunity can spark a new feature, a new product or, in this case, a new Playground piece.
We were doing a design exercise recently during one of our weekly Design Team scrum, trying to sketch out ways of organizing photos. Alina, our Design Lead, threw out the suggestion that you could just draw a line through them. Then Jon suggested that it would make an interesting playground piece. And Geoff, our intern, sparked with inspiration made it so that night from the comfort of his home.
Thus was born, Wrangle, our latest Playground experiment.
Wrangling the Herd
Wrangle is an experimental jQuery plugin that will have you rustling up a herd of photos like a real cowpoke. Our tool gives your app a new way to select multiple images with your mouse or fingertips. To quote Val Kilmer in "Tombstone," this tool's your huckleberry when it comes to images.
This tool, however, is quite experimental and cutting edge, especially when it comes to using touch support. That's because this tech still has a few hiccups with Windows 8 and Android devices — so there are quite a few kinks to work out in this arena, but Wrangle is a good start.
The vast majority of browsers these days support the basic drawing we're doing with Canvas, but touch support can be a bit spotty. Wrangle, however, supports mouse, touch and MSPointer events, but your milage may vary depending on the device and browser. Hands down, iOS provides the best experience in terms of smoothness.
But when it comes to being responsive, Wrangle's got it. It doesn't need Foundation to work, but it does play nice with our responsive framework. It was built from the ground up to be touch-friendly and responsive, so you can use with any photo gallery.
One of Our Oldest Properties Finally Goes Responsive
Every time we release a new responsive Playground piece, especially one that works with Foundation, we get one or two folks mentioning that the actual page isn't responsive. The Playground is one of our oldest properties and upgrading it to look good across devices has been on our list for a while. Now we've finally knocked it off and the entire Playground can be viewed nicely on any device!
A little bit of history first. The Playground is one of our oldest properties and a cornerstone of our Expo library. It started off as a place to post our experiments, but slowly grew and grew to what it is today as we added more and more bits to it. It was built on our old code, CSS Grid Builder, which you can consider to be Foundation's ancestor. The core elements of what became Foundation were also born in this caldron of experimentation, such as Orbit, Reveal and Joyride.
Our free annotation tool, Bounce, also found its early home here. Of course, that later lead to Notable. So we've had quite a few graduates from the Playground. A lot of what we are today find its start in the Playground. Which is why we've left our old experiments up, even if they are out of date. They're nice snapshots of where we've been. We'll continue to chart where we're going on the Playground.
And we're on the wagon train to those uncharted territories with Wrangle, so grab your lasso and your saddle.
Wrangle Your Photos
