Harry Bailey

Harry Bailey specialise's in turning project chaos into clarity. With two decades of hands-on agency experience and agile-certified expertise, he offers practical, immediately actionable strategies, not just theory, to dramatically improve agency project delivery.

Animating Fade Of Twitter Bootstrap Buttons

I came across a curious issue today. You can’t select a period of time over which to fade out and fade in Twitter Bootstrap buttons.

If you apply jQuery fadeTo() or animate() they fade out and they fade in, but they do it in their own time.

This may be related to a css transition which is applied in the bootstrap css, I haven’t had a chance to look, but the workaround for me is to put the button in a span and fade the span in and out instead.

   Button Text

CSS3 Element Wiggle With Keyframes

This technique produces something similar to the wiggle you get on an iPhone when deleting items.

Be aware that keyframe animation is still very poor in Chrome and cases freezing and jumping if multiple items are animated at once.

The animation css below results in a hovered element rotating back and forth around it’s centre point. You can update the number of degrees and length of animation to change the appearance.

Just add this css and give your element the class ‘wiggler’ to implement

/* safari and chrome */
@-webkit-keyframes wiggle {
	0% {-webkit-transform:rotate(4deg);}
	50% {-webkit-transform:rotate(-4deg);}
	100% {-webkit-transform:rotate(4deg);}
}

/* firefox */
@-moz-keyframes wiggle {
	0% {-moz-transform:rotate(4deg);}
	50% {-moz-transform:rotate(-4deg);}
	100% {-moz-transform:rotate(4deg);}
}

/* anyone brave enough to implement the ideal method */
@keyframes wiggle {
	0% {transform:rotate(4deg);}
	50% {transform:rotate(-4deg);}
	100% {transform:rotate(4deg);}
}

.wiggler:hover {
	-webkit-animation: wiggle 0.5s infinite;
	-moz-animation: wiggle 0.5s infinite;
	animation: wiggle 0.5s infinite;
}

Twitter Bootstrap Tabs On Right Side

Twitter’s bootstrap css currently doesn’t support tabs on the right hand side or floated right. We’ll here is the css to allow it.

We’ll stick to existing naming. Twitter use secondary-nav within topbar so let’s use that…

.tabs .secondary-nav {
	float:right;
	margin-left:10px;
	margin-right:0;
}

The the html for the tab you want to float right you need:

The outcome is most tabs on the left and any with the new class positioned over to the right.

Replace Spotlight With Alfred App

If you own a Mac and you haven’t heard of Alfred App then you’ve likely been living in a bunker for a while.

At very least Alfred allows you to quickly start applications. If you choose to delve deeper you can use it to search and open files, run applescripts, quick jump to webpage searches, send emails, control iTunes and 999 other clever tricks.

When you first get your Mac you will likely have heard of Spotlight, a built in application that can be used to search applications and files. It’s hotkey is cmd-space. It isn’t as flexible as Alfred App but it has the best hotkey combination going.

Before we start if you’ve turned off Alfred’s menu bar icon, turn it back on in Alfred appearance preferences. It’s makes for the easiest method of opening during hotkey move.

Here is how to move Alfred App to use cmd-space and Spotlight to use ctrl-space:

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts

spotlight keyboard shortcuts

1) In the left column click Spotlight.
2) In the right column click the current key combination for spotlight of ⌘Space (cmd-space) and input your replacement key combination. I recommend ^Space (ctrl-space) although some other applications occasionally reserve it (such as Things App). At this point if you can see it you could also switch the second hotkey combination over to ⌥^Space (alt-ctrl-space).
3) Don’t worry about remembering the old hotkeys. If you change your mind later as you can click Restore Defaults to undo your changes.

You can close system preferences now.

So we’ve moved Spotlight, but now we need to move Alfred to ⌘Space (cmd-space).

Click on Alfred’s top hat menu bar icon and select preferences. (you may need to restart Alfred at this point for it to recognise that you’ve moved Spotlight to a new hotkey.

Choose General and you should see a large box Alfred Hotkey box. Click it and press our new hotkey for Alfred App.
⌘Space (cmd-space)

Alfred Preferences

And that’s it. You should now see Spotlight when you hit ^Space (ctrl-space) and Alfred when you click ⌘Space (cmd-space).