impress.js

It's a presentation framework based on the power of CSS3 transforms and transitions in modern browsers and inspired by the idea behind prezi.com.

WARNING

impress.js may not help you if you have nothing interesting to say ;)

ABOUT THE NAME

impress.js name in courtesy of @skuzniak.

It's an (un)fortunate coincidence that a Open/LibreOffice presentation tool is called Impress ;)

VERSION HISTORY

0.3 (browse, zip, tar)

• minor CSS 3D fixes
• basic API to control the presentation flow from JavaScript
• touch event support
• basic support for iPad (iOS 5 and iOS 4 with polyfills) and Blackberry Playbook

UPGRADING FROM PREVIOUS VERSIONS

Because API was introduced the way impress.js script is initialized was changed a bit. You not only has to include impress.js script file, but also call impress() function.

See the source of index.html for example and more details.

0.2 (browse, zip, tar)

• tutorial/documentation added to index.html source file
• being even more strict with strict mode
• code clean-up
• couple of small bug-fixes

0.1 (browse, zip, tar)

First release.

Contains basic functionality for step placement and transitions between them with simple fallback for non-supporting browsers.

HOW TO USE IT

Use the source, Luke ;)

If you have no idea what I mean by that, or you just clicked that link above and got very confused by all these strange characters that got displayed on your screen, it's a sign, that impress.js is not for you.

Sorry.

Fortunately there are some guys on GitHub that got quite excited with the idea of building editing tool for impress.js. Let's hope they will manage to do it.

EXAMPLES AND DEMOS

Official demo

impress.js demo by @bartaz

Presentations

CSS 3D transforms from meet.js summit by @bartaz

What the Heck is Responsive Web Design by John Polacek @johnpolacek

12412.org presentation to Digibury by Stephen Fulljames @fulljames

Data center virtualization with Wakame-VDC by Andreas Kieckens @Metallion98

Asynchronous JavaScript by Mariusz Nowak @medikoo

Introduction to Responsive Design by Alec Rust [@alecrust] (http://twitter.com/alecrust)

Bonne année 2012 by Edouard Cunibil @DuaelFr

Careers in Free and Open Source Software by Exequiel Ceasar Navarrete @ichigo1411

Websites and portfolios

lioshi.com by @lioshi

alingham.com by Al Ingham @alingham

nice-shots.de by @NiceShots

museum140 Shorty Award promo video entirely made with ImpressJS by @thingsinjars

If you have used impress.js in your presentation (or website) and would like to have it listed here, please contact me via GitHub or send me a pull request to updated README.md file.

BROWSER SUPPORT

TL;DR;

Currently impress.js works fine in latest Chrome/Chromium browser, Safari 5.1 and Firefox 10. With addition of some HTML5 polyfills (see below for details) it should work in Internet Explorer 10 (currently available as Developers Preview). It doesn't work in Opera, as it doesn't support CSS 3D transforms.

As a presentation tool it was not developed with mobile browsers in mind, but some tablets are good enough to run it, so it should work quite well on iPad (iOS 5, or iOS 4 with HTML5 polyfills) and Blackberry Playbook.

Still interested? Read more...

Additionally for the animations to run smoothly it's required to have hardware acceleration support in your browser. This depends on the browser, your operating system and even kind of graphic hardware you have in your machine.

For browsers not supporting CSS3 3D transforms impress.js adds impress-not-supported class on #impress element, so fallback styles can be applied to make all the content accessible.

Even more explanation and technical stuff

Let's put this straight -- wide browser support was (and is) not on top of my priority list for impress.js. It's built on top of fresh technologies that just start to appear in the browsers and I'd like to rather look forward and develop for the future than being slowed down by the past.

But it's not "hard-coded" for any particular browser or engine. If any browser in future will support features required to run impress.js, it will just begin to work there without changes in the code.

From technical point of view all the positioning of presentation elements in 3D requires CSS 3D transforms support. Transitions between presentation steps are based on CSS transitions. So these two features are required by impress.js to display presentation correctly.

Unfortunately the support for CSS 3D transforms and transitions is not enough for animations to run smoothly. If the browser doesn't support hardware acceleration or the graphic card is not good enough the transitions will be laggy.

Additionally the code of impress.js relies on APIs proposed in HTML5 specification, including classList and dataset APIs. If they are not available in the browser, impress.js will not work.

Fortunately, as these are JavaScript APIs there are polyfill libraries that patch older browsers with these APIs.

For example IE10 is said to support CSS 3D transforms and transitions, but it doesn't have classList not dataset APIs implemented at the moment. So including polyfill libraries should help IE10 with running impress.js.

And few more details about mobile support

Mobile browsers are currently not supported. Even Android browsers that support CSS 3D transforms are forced into fallback view at this point.

Fortunately some tablets seem to have good enough hardware support and browsers to handle it. Currently impress.js presentations should work on iPad and Blackberry Playbook.

In theory iPhone should also be able to run it (as it runs the same software as iPad), but I haven't found a good way to handle it's small screen.

Also note that iOS supports classList and dataset APIs starting with version 5, so iOS 4.X and older requires polyfills to work.

LICENSE

Copyright 2011-2012 Bartek Szopka. Released under MIT License.