Animate Multiple Tags Sequentially
You can leverage jQuery's built-in animation queueing, if you just select a tag like body to do global queueing:
// Convenience object to ease global animation queueing
$.globalQueue = {
queue: function(anim) {
$('body')
.queue(function(dequeue) {
anim()
.queue(function(innerDequeue) {
dequeue();
innerDequeue();
});
});
return this;
}
};
// Animation that coordinates multiple tags
$(".button").click(function() {
$.globalQueue
.queue(function() {
return $("#header").animate({top: "-50"}, "slow");
}).queue(function() {
return $("#something").animate({height: "hide"}, "slow");
}).queue(function() {
return $("ul#menu").animate({top: "20", left: "0"}, "slow");
}).queue(function() {
return $(".trigger").animate({height: "show", top: "110", left: "0"}, "slow");
});
});
http://jsfiddle.net/b9chris/wjpL31o0/
So, here's why this works, and what it's doing:
The call to $.globalQueue.queue() is just queueing a call to your tag's animation, but it queues it on the body tag.
When jQuery hits your tag animation in the body queue, your tag's animation starts, on the queue for your tag - but the way the jQuery animation framework works, any custom animation callback causes a tag's animation queue (the body's in this case) to halt, until the custom animation calls the passed-in dequeue() function. So, even though the queues for your animated tag and body are separate, the body tag's queue is now waiting for its dequeue() to be called. http://api.jquery.com/queue/#queue-queueName-callback
We just make the last queued item on the tag's queue a call to continue the global queue by calling its dequeue() function - that's what ties the queues together.
For convenience the globalQueue.queue method returns a this reference for easy chaining.
setInterval
For the sake of completeness, it's easy to land here just seeking an alternative to setInterval - that is you're not so much looking to make separate animations coordinate, as just fire them over time without the strange surge ahead in your animation caused by the way newer browsers will postpone animation queues and timers to save CPU.
You can replace a call to setInterval like this:
setInterval(doAthing, 8000);
With this:
/**
* Alternative to window.setInterval(), that plays nicely with modern animation and CPU suspends
*/
$.setInterval = function (fn, interval) {
var body = $('body');
var queueInterval = function () {
body
.delay(interval)
.queue(function(dequeue) {
fn();
queueInterval();
dequeue(); // Required for the jQuery animation queue to work (tells it to continue animating)
});
};
queueInterval();
};
$.setInterval(doAthing, 8000);
http://jsfiddle.net/b9chris/h156wgg6/
And avoid those awkward blasts of animation when a background tab has its animations re-enabled by the browser.
