jqlouds

An awesome yet simple plugin for jquery that let's you create clouds on the fly.

Getting Started

With Bower

You can include jQlouds in your project with bower with:

bower install jqlouds --save

Manual

Download the production version or the development version and include script after the jQuery library (unless you are packaging scripts somehow else).

In your web page:

<script src="jquery.js"></script>
<script src="dist/jquery.jqlouds.min.js"></script>

Documentation

Basic usage

As you can see in the getting started section, you just need to pass a jquery selector and call the plugin in order to get the job done.

You can generate multiple clouds on the same page, each element will be filled with random static clouds. Note that the selected element will be relatively positioned in order to accomodate absolutely positioned clouds.

$('#sky1, #sky2').jQlouds();

Height of the sky

Unlike the real sky, here we know exactly how much it is height: minimu height is given automatically based on the height of the biggest cloud. You can give a different height to the element throug the plugin itself.

via css

<div id="sky" style="height:223px;"></div>
<script>
jQuery(function($) {
  $('#sky').jQlouds();
});
</script>

via jquery

<div id="sky"></div>
<script>
jQuery(function($) {
  $('#sky').jQlouds({ skyHeight: 223 });
});
</script>

Animation

Sometimes the wind blows and clouds became to move around the sky, isn't it? Well, you can turn on your very personal wind just by setting it to true:

$('#sky').jQlouds({
  wind: true
});

note about performances

jQlouds relies on jQuery's .animate() to perform its animations. Since this is something quite heavy, animations come disabled by default. I'll try to improve this feature with CSS3 animations. If you'd like to contribute feel free to fork this project and submit a pull request.

Number of clouds

The amount of clouds is chosen randomly between 20 and 30.

You can adjust these values settings minClouds and maxClouds parameters:

$('#sky').jQlouds({
  minClouds: 5,
  maxClouds: 10
});

Maximum clouds' size

The default image provided (it is served as base64 image so you won't need to upload anything but the plugin) is 227x96 px. All the clouds generated are randomly sized less or equal to that size. You can adjust this behavior as per your needs with:

$('#sky').jQlouds({
  maxWidth: 113,
  maxHeight: 48,
});

Customize the cloud

If you don't like my cloud (how dare you! :P) you just need to change the src property when calling the plugin, like so:

$('#sky').jQlouds({
  src: 'path/to/image.png',
});

Options

These are all the current options supported by jQlouds, as we've seen above:

options = {
  src: 'images/cloud.png', // path to image, the default is a base64 (you can see the actual string in sources)
  maxWidth: 227, // max image's width
  maxHeight: 96, // amx image's height
  minClouds: 20, // minimum amount of clouds
  maxClouds: 30, // maximum amount of clouds
  skyHeight: null, // height of the container element
  wind: false // animate clouds, default is false
};

$('#sky').jQlouds(options);

Examples

You can see this plugin in action here.

ToDo

✔️ Introduce CSS3 animations with jQuery.animate() fallback ✔️ Release on bower registry ✔️ Release on jQuery Plugins registry (until 0.2.3 since the registry is now deprecated) ✔️ Release on npm as per jQuery new policy ✖️ SVG images with png fallback ✖️ ? (suggestion welcomed)

Release History

• v1.0.0 - 27/01/15
  • check for 3D support and apply jQyery.animate() as a fallback if not supported
  • bumped version to 1.0.0 on bower and jquery
• v0.2.3-css3 - 27/01/15
  • alternative version that leverage hardware acceleration via CSS3 and translate3d (see the css3 branch)
• v0.2.3 - 06/07/14
  • registered to the bower repository
  • pushed to the jquery plugin registry
  • published the little demo website
• v0.2.0 - 06/07/14
  • improved clouds' positioning
  • introduced configurable container's height
  • written an hopefully decent README.md
• v0.1.0 - 05/07/14
  • first release