Spin.Js

What do you like best?

I was there when the world of web development was taken by storm by the (re)discovery of the superpowers of XMLHttpRequest(), and already had a few years of experience under my belt.So I remember well we were missing a way of indicating that an Ajax request was being performed; soon after that came websites that allowed you to download a plethora of GIF and PNG spinners of varying size and (usually low) quality. Spin.js is the highly polished stepchild of those early attempts, and provides a neat ES6 JS script that can generate a spinner from a number of parameters. If you are the rare kind of developer who needs exactly this kind of indicator, there's nothing better that Spin.js.

What do you dislike?

Well, most CSS frameworks nowadays provide built-in spinners of various kinds, so using an highly specialised, parametrised script like this can be viewed as a sort of overkill, given that nobody will really care about the length and radius of your loading indicators.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Well, if you need this exact kind of spinner and/or you are of the maniacal type who needs to micromanage every single aspect of what you are creating, then go for it; else you may be good to go with the brea dand butter spinners provided by your CSS framework of choice or copy/paste SVG animations from the interwebs or whatever.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Actually I used Spin.js only once, for fun, on a side project where I wanted to have a really huge loading indicator to elicit surprise in my user, and since this script uses scalable graphics that are always crisp and well defined, it allowed me to generate a larger-than-life spinner that occupied almost the entire screen.