Or put another way, its worth remembering that just because you can incorporate all of these effects does not mean you should. Some designs can be very disorienting to some people.
You're right, the dreaded Flash sites of four years ago haunt me every day. However, I've seen some outstanding designs using these techniques. They were outstanding because they were done by professional interface designers. Put these tools in the right hands, and you'll get amazing results.
Also, without profiling, it's hard to say if the slight choppiness is due to the library itself not being optimized, the browser rendering engine not being optimized, a combination of such, or other factors.
Skrollr is noteworthy because it's significantly smaller (5.5kb vs. 94kb+jQuery), and makes use of HTML5 data attributes for notation.
I had similar issues trying to spice up a presentation website with transitions and animations. The simpler examples[x] seem to be working much better.
In my experience, Firefox and Chrome tend to perform very flakey when CSS3 transitions/animations are in question. It's like a random performance profile is chosen every time the document loads. More often than not, the second time to load the transitions/animations work great, as if the browser performed some CSS JIT, but performance often drops again on consecutive loads.
I hope these features mature performance-wise, so we can start using them in meaningful ways (and also survive the 2001-style abominations that are bound to happen). I think it's sensible to use requestAnimationFrame[r] to determine if the animations aren't performing well, and disable them accordingly.
[x]: https://github.com/Prinzhorn/skrollr/tree/master/examples#ex...
[r]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.requestAnimation...
There are quite a few decent parallax scripts/libs out there, but most of them rely on scrolling (like Skrollr) or cursor position tracking (github's 404 page). Am I the only one who likes to be able to page through parallax with buttons?
http://eee.asus.com/eeepad/transformer-prime/features/
It starts off with a typical terrible "people you would never see use an Asus product" photo and quickly gets very cool.
2.8 quad core, os x, chrome 19.0.1084.56
Neat script though.
I guess I'm on a mouse now, but even on my last laptop, the "smooth scrolling" was the regular 20px jump scrolling but with smoothing between jumps which would seem to make this still fairly jumpy.
Nice choice with the name as well. Easy to rememeber and has a good typing rhythm.
