Busy indicator component

[MarkMurphy]

It would be nice to have a busy indicator component. Almost every site I build today uses ajax in some way, usually to handle form submissions so I have a constant need for these indicators.

[cvrebert]

Duplicate of #6454.
Try Font Awesome's spinner: http://fontawesome.io/examples/#spinning

[MarkMurphy]

Closing it was a bit premature don't you think? Do you not feel that this idea fits with the scope and aims of the project?

I bet no one working on the project goes a single day without seeing one of these component's somewhere.

Try Font Awesome's spinner: http://fontawesome.io/examples/#spinning

Meh.

[cvrebert]

I personally agree with you, but @mdo has historically disagreed multiple times.

[mdo]

Yeah, it'd be nice to have an official spinner. I'm down to add one, but options are kinda meh all around honestly:

• It needs to be retina-ready
• Needs to work in IE8+
• Needs to work on light backgrounds and dark—alphatransparency would be bomb
• Would be cool if it was a font, but PNG or GIF is fine, too
• Available in multiple sizes

I don't know of any off the top of my head that meet all those criteria. If you have ideas, I'm open to hearing them.

[hnrch02]

@mdo Well, spin.js meets all of your above mentioned criteria but it is a pure JS solution—probably not what you had in mind, I suppose.

[mdo]

Yeah I thought about that, but it's another dependency that I don't want to maintain as part of Bootstrap. Definitely something folks can snag and implement on their own.

[MarkMurphy]

@mdo Thanks for being open to a discussion around this.

It needs to be retina-ready
Needs to work in IE8+
Needs to work on light backgrounds and dark—alphatransparency would be bomb
Would be cool if it was a font, but PNG or GIF is fine, too
Available in multiple sizes
I don't know of any off the top of my head that meet all those criteria. If you have ideas, I'm open to hearing them.

Yes, exactly and that's why I thought it would be a perfect project for Bootstrap. I'm fairly confident we can come up with something to meet all those criteria. I'd be happy to put some experiments together after we nail down all requirements.

[MarkMurphy]

Spin.js is interesting but it has it's limitations style wise. If we were to offer an all javascript solution I would want to fork from that and extend it further to create a custom bootstrap version with more/alternative style options.

@mdo What are your thoughts around using a font custom built for this purpose, animated via css with an extremely simple polyfill to handle animation in IE 8-9.

This would allow you to easily create a spinner any size that defaults to the line-hight of text, that looks great at any resolution, and that you can change the color and alphatransparency of.

This would also add the ability for the user to create custom animations that alter any or all of the above attributes throughout the animation.

The font itself could include different styles of spinners or even have different characters representing keyframes of an animation.

[erinzm]

BTW font-awesome spinners look really wobbly on my computer.

[tedyoung]

ArchimedesPi, agreed. The center of rotation is off.

[MarkMurphy]

@mdo Just an update to this thread, this looks like a nice solution which could be adopted:

http://semantic-ui.com/elements/loader.html