Learn Elixir, Greensock and Particle

Animations attract the eye and add a higher level of engagement for your users. But they’re not easy to set up, and they don’t always look the way they should on every browser. 

Greensock is the best platform available for creating performant, highly-customizable animations. This course will walk you through the features of Greensock, including how to:

- animate an element
- manually control an animation
- animate between CSS classes

…and more, with cross-browser support to ensure your animations look sharp everywhere.

Ultra high-performance, professional-grade HTML5 animation for the modern web

greensock

Create Amazing Animations with GreenSock

These videos include the introductory steps to writing your first Elixir function and beginning to understand some key concepts in Elixir that make it unique. 

Some of those concepts include:
- the Mix build tool
- project structure
- collections of functions written in modules
- function *arity*
- pattern matching and common uses for it
- the pipe operator

Elixir is a dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications.

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

elixir

Getting Started with Elixir

In this lesson, we will look at Greensock's Draggable API. We will implement a scrollable `<div>` container and explore some options available.

Create scrollable DOM elements with Greensock

particle

Before powering up the Particle Photon we are going to look at what each of the components are on the board.

Particle Photon Component Overview

The pipe operator is an easy to use and powerful feature of Elixir. It takes the output from the expression on the left, and automatically passes it as the first argument to the function on the right. This is especially useful when chaining together multiple function calls or data transformations. Using the pipe operator results in code that's easier to read, write and refactor.

Chain Function Calls with the Pipe Operator in Elixir

Modern development requires modern tooling. Rather than adding GreenSock as a script to an HTML page, we're going to install GreenSock using Yarn and set up our development environment using Parcel. This will allow us to quickly iterate and test out our animation ideas. GreenSock is abbreviated as `gsap` when importing.

Setup GreenSock as a Module with Parcel

Animating an element to a click event is as simple as passing the x and y coordinates of the click event to the properties of the `TweenMax.to` call. To be able to center the element where the mouse clicks, you also need to adjust the special xPercent and yPercent properties so the element is properly offset.

Animate and Center an Element to a Click Event with GreenSock

Rotating an element with GreenSock is as simple as changing the `rotation` property using `TweenMax`. But there's also a hugely convenient trick using the `+=` or `-+` syntax as a string that allows you to adjust based on the previous value of the rotation.

Rotate an Element Based on Previous Values with GreenSock

Animations often have multiple steps. GreenSock makes this simple with the concept of a timeline where you code each point you want your element to move to. This lesson will show you how to set up a timeline as well as pause and resume the timeline animation.

Create Animation Steps with GreenSock's Timeline

You often need to pause or resume an animation based on whether or not the current animation running. The `isActive()` getter returns a boolean that provides you with that information (the opposite information can be found with using the `paused()` getter).

Pause or Resume an Animation by Checking isActive with GreenSock

GreenSock also supports the ability to animate `from` a variable point to the current point. If you think `to` starts at a static point and moves to a variable point then `from` essentially does the opposite. `fromTo` supports the scenario where both points are variables and requires passing in a "from" set of properties and a "to" set of properties.

Animate From a Variable Point with from and fromTo in GreenSock

Each animation can be moved to a specific point in time based on the `progress` setting between 0 and 1 (0% and 100%). This lesson shows how to control the progress using the scroll wheel of the mouse which can easily fast-forward or rewind through the timeline.

Manually Control the Animation with progress in GreenSock

Any GreenSock animation can accept an array of dom elements. This lesson shows you how to easily create and tween 100 divs to the same point.

Control an Array of Elements with the Same Animation in GreenSock

There are many reasons you'd want to stop an animation from running. `TweenMax` provides ways to stop a tween of a specific element or every tween currently running, we are going to look at two of them, `killTweensOf` and `killAll`. This lesson walks you through stopping a tween by clicking on a specific element or stopping every tween and forcing them all to complete.

Stop Animations with killTweensOf and killAll in GreenSock

GreenSock enables you to animate between classes defined in your stylesheets using the `className` syntax in your tween properties. This lesson walks you through using the `mouseover`/`mouseout` and `mousedown`/`mouseup` events to add and remove css classes based on the specific event.

Animate Between CSS Classes with GreenSock

GreenSock supports all of the CSS3 3d properties, so you can freely rotate around X, Y, and Z axises with rotationX, rotationY, and rotationZ. Once that's set up, you can tweak the perspective of the element with transformPerspective.

Spin Elements in 3d with GreenSock

By default, elements use their own perspective, so if you rotate multiple elements on the page the perspective will seem a bit off for each of them. The solution is to set the perspective on the container element, then each child element will follow the parents' perspective.

Control the Shared 3d Perspective of Multiple Elements with GreenSock

Sometimes you want to leave an animation looping without any user interaction. This is done using the "repeat" and "yoyo" properties combined to keep the tween moving back and forth from the start properties to the end properties.

Loop a Tween Forever Using Yoyo and Repeat with GreenSock

Bootstrap a new Elixir project using Mix (a build tool included when you install Elixir), with its built in project generation.

Additional resources:
- [Official introduction to Mix](https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/mix-otp/introduction-to-mix.html#our-first-project)

Generate a new Elixir project using Mix

Elixir code is organized into groups of functions called modules. You can create your own modules and built on top of predefined modules that are a part of Elixir by default.

Additional resources: 
- [Getting started with Modules and function from Elixir docs](https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/modules-and-functions.html)

Write a New Function Inside of an Elixir Module

The syntax to pass arguments into functions is akin to many other languages. Elixir functions are uniquely recognized when running based off of the number of arguments passed in (a term called *arity*). This means you can define functions with the same name, so long as a different number of arguments is passed in.

Arity is a key concept to be aware of when reading documentation and writing your own code.

Additional resources:
- [Information about arity](https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/modules-and-functions.html#function-capturing)
- [Default arguments in functions](https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/modules-and-functions.html#default-arguments)

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