Genie animation Javascript?

Question

Is there a jQuery plugin or javascript library that supports a \"genie\" animation effect like the apple Mac OS X dock?

Bonus: Actionscript library? C/C++? .NET? Obj

Answer 1

Not that I know of. The ‘genie’ effect is a distortion that cannot be achieved with CSS: CSS transformations (including IE's matrix filter) give you resizing on both axes, rotation and shear. WebKit additionally gives you linear perspectives. Curvy distortions like genie can't be reproduced with those tools.

To do it in JavaScript you'd have to split the image (or other element if you are really ambitious) into one line per pixel and squash horizontally using a CSS transformation. It would be horribly inefficient to render and would probably look jerky and flickery as well as unpleasantly aliased.