Another Reflector – blazingly fast
As you may have noticed, even the improved version of the scriptaculous Reflector is too slow to be used on pages with more than just a few small images.
So I took the opportunity to look at a Javascript subject that so far had escaped my studies, that is, the Safari/Gecko canvas tag. The canvas tag offers powerful drawing capabilities which are performed right in the browser, have a look at some of it’s capabilities.
Of course, IE goes a different way and does not support canvas. Still, by applying its CSS filter attribute one can get a similar reflection effect.
Faster reflecions
Recently, Thomas Fuchs came up with a nice prototype/scriptaculous-based piece of code, the Reflector, which renders shiny image reflections in the browser.
However, it’s performance so far is a bit weak. It is a proof of concept and Thomas himself calls it “not really meant for production use yet”. In the following you find an (speedwise) improved version, which boosts rendering time by a factor of 2–3.
Demo and comparison page