Okay, so today I wanted to play around with a simple animation concept: tracking a balloon as it floats across the screen. I had this idea of a red balloon just drifting, and I wanted to know, “Where is the balloon now?” at any given moment. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, let’s see how it went!
Getting Started
First, I needed something to actually see. I grabbed a basic HTML file. I threw in a
I figured JavaScript was the way to go for the animation. I added a tag to my HTML and started brainstorming.
The Animation Logic
My initial plan was pretty straightforward:
- Get the balloon element: Easy enough, I used *().
- Set initial position: I decided the balloon should start at the bottom left of the screen.
- Animate it!: Here’s where the fun (and a little bit of head-scratching) began. I used setInterval() to repeatedly update the balloon’s position.
Inside the setInterval(), I did the following every few milliseconds:
- I incremented the balloon’s ‘left’ and ‘top’ CSS properties. This made it move diagonally upwards and to the right.
- I added a litte check. I am saying, “Hey, if the balloon goes off-screen, wrap it back around to the other side.” This kept it from disappearing forever.
Tracking the Position
Now for the main part: figuring out where the balloon is at any time.I wanted to display the balloon’s current coordinates on the screen. So, I added another
Inside my animation loop (the setInterval()), I updated the text content of this new
Putting It All Together
After a bit of tweaking with the animation speed and the update interval, I had something pretty cool. A red balloon happily drifting across the screen, and its current coordinates displayed right there. It was a neat little experiment.
I kept making minor adjustment for a fun. And the concept is basic, but it’s a good starting point for more complex animations. It showed me how to keep track of an element’s position dynamically, which is something I’m sure I’ll use again.