Stylie is a fun tool for easily creating CSS 3 animations. You can configure your animation graphically, tweak it, grab the generated CSS and go!
Watch this screencast for a quick tutorial.
When you first open the app, you will see a little ball moving from left to right. You probably don't want to animate an image of a ball, so click the "HTML" tab in the control panel on the right. This textarea contains the HTML that is being animated. You can put whatever you want in here, but let's stick some text in there for starters:
<h1>Hello there!</h1>The preview updates automatically. Next, you'll want to change the beginning and ending positions of the animation. Just click and drag the crosshairs to your liking. When your cursor is not focused on a text input, you can hold the Shift key to make rotation handles appear on the crosshairs. Click and drag the handles to modify the starting and ending rotation positions.
You can add, remove and edit keyframes. This is done in the "Keyframes" tab. When you first open Stylie, you are presented with the default keyframes. Keyframe 0 cannot be moved and has no easing properties associated with it, but all of the other keyframes do. To add a new keyframe, click the "Add a Keyframe" button in the upper right portion of the tab. You can add as many keyframes as you'd like. You can also reorder keyframes by clicking their millisecond value and pressing the Enter key.
You can tweak individual keyframe properties by pressing the "up" and "down" arrow keys when focusing on a property's text input. You can change individual properties' easing formula by selecting it from the dropdown next to each text input. To remove a keyframe, click the "X" in the upper right corner of a keyframe.
In addition to the standard easing formulae, you can define your own custom formula in the "Motion" tab. Simply input your formula into the "Custom easing" fields. What you put into these fields must be valid JavaScript. Once you have inputted your custom formula, you can select "customEase1" or "customEase2" from a property's easing dropdown.
You'll notice a play head in the bottom left of the screen. This is fully interactive; you can can play, pause and stop the animation. You can also click and drag the play head and zip to any part of the timeline.
Once you've configured the animation to your liking, it is time to generate the CSS to be used in your web page. Click on the "CSS" tab in the control panel to see the ready-to-use CSS. You can configure the generated CSS for your specific needs, such as the name of the CSS class on the DOM element to be animated, and which browser vendors you want to support. More complex animations will generate very verbose CSS, so be aware of that.
Stylie is open source, so you are welcome to make changes. If you do, you'll
want to use dev.html, not index.html. The latter is generated by the build
process.
Building Stylie requires NodeJS and Bower. One those are installed, run this BASH command to download the dependencies:
# npm is installed as part of the standard Node distribution
npm install; bower install
Once the development dependencies are installed, you can compile the code with:
node build.js
Ta-da! All of the JavaScript binaries will be generated and index.html will
be updated.
A note about script loading in Stylie: Code is loaded in kind of a weird way,
because it works well enough and there hasn't been a good reason to take the
time to straighten it out. In short, libraries like jQuery and Backbone are
loaded with <script> elements in the development HTML, and app modules are
loaded with Require.js. So, libraries are exposed globally.
I can't design things, but I know people that can. The overall look of the app is courtesy of Jon Victorino. The Help icon was masterfully crafted by @nrrrdcore.
Stylie is distributed under an MIT license. You are encouraged to use and modify the code to suit your needs, as well as redistribute it.