This is powerful feature, but the demo example doesn't really give justice to it. There needs to be a good reason to use it. Resorting from name to size of the file it not it.<p>For instance:<p>- Filtering down to a small subset from a large set of visible items. It makes sense to use this effect in case the selected item's representation is zoomed or displays additional detail. The animation indicates that there's a relation between the selection and the larger set. It also gives a clue original distribution of the selected items within the larger set.<p>Example: Show all facebook connections groupped by country. Then select those that have a particular interest as a list. The animation would give you a clue about geo-distribution of people having the same interest. This clue is an additional information you could not see by simply showing the selection.<p>- Reordering (eg. promoting) a small set of items in a large set. The animation shows you how far the item travels when it is promoted.<p>Example: Display the list of tennis players according to their rank at after a given competition. When the user selects the different competition, the list is reordered. The payers who make big jumps attract more attention.
Nice, but how many items can it handle without getting choppy? I see 13 items in that demo. Can it do 30? 50?<p>I worked on a large project that attempted to do this for new cars, which is a slightly larger dataset, and in the end we went with Flex because it had much of the functionality built in, and could do the animations much more smoothly.<p>Check it out:
<a href="http://www.newcars.com/carchooser#6" rel="nofollow">http://www.newcars.com/carchooser#6</a><p>Try clicking on "Price" in the left hand nav, and then moving the slider.
Hmmmm... does require the addition of a non-standard attribute ("data-id") to the HTML/XHTML... so it will be invalid... Shame that cant be done with class names. E.g. class="data-id-macos".