Today I am soft-launching my first contribution to the front-end and web development community, FreezeUI.

It is not perfect, but it is good enough from my point of view and hopefully yours.

And I am a bit afraid to let it out into the wild, so I am doing it: https://alexradulescu.github.io/freeze-ui/

Next you will find some basic data and the short story of why I did it.

1. What is it?

It is a loading spinner. A micro-script, running a simple loading spinner, with only the most basic options. A javascript micro library for loading and freezing the UI.

And you can see it running on its website(https://alexradulescu.github.io/freeze-ui/). I wanted to publish a gif, but it looks horrible, so I am skipping it.

2. How to use it?

Rather simple. Just load the super small css and javascript files. And then call FreezeUI() to run it and UnFreezeUI() to stop it.

3. Can it be customised?

You can customise the loading message similar to this: FreezeUI({ text: 'Custom text' });

And you can choose if you only want to see it over a certain block in your html code like: FreezeUI({ selector: '.class-name' });

Or even both. For more details go to https://alexradulescu.github.io/freeze-ui/#documentation

4. Browser support

By default it uses ES6 so it would support the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, iOS and Android.

There is also an older version using ES5, which should support down to IE10 but I haven't tested it as I don't have a windows machine (but I will this week).

5. It seems kind of simple. Any plans for more features?

Yes and no. No, in fact mostly no ;-). I will not be adding any more features, as it is on purpose as small and as simple as possible. If you want to change the design or some of the functionality, the un-minified code is so small and simple that it is easier to make it your own. Besides it is under MIT licence so be my guest.

I will fix any bugs make any improvements that anyone will suggest, so make it more efficient, smaller or faster. Just comment below.

Its story

A few months ago, I joined Octus, this small but way more awesome company than I expected. We are building this not-small-anymore recruitment CRM as a web platform. The guys have been working on it for 3 years. And so many things changed in these years when it comes to Javascript and web development in general.

Besides I am the kind of practical front-end developer. I love to write simple, efficient, beautiful code, to do its job and only it's job. I am a bit of a hater when it comes to overly generic, do-anything frameworks and plugins.

And one if the first thing I saw at Octus, was this simple loading spinner plugin, needing jQuery, and having over 600 lines of code, way too many options and looking rather ugly. So I decided to do the exact opposite. And then to offer it to the world :-D.

So in conclusion, I hope you'll like it, I hope it will be of some use, and please open an issue on github (https://github.com/alexradulescu/FreezeUI) or leave a comment if you have any suggestions for improvements, fixes or ideas. And feel free to show your work for inspiration too :-D.