Reactive Listener: Affect change over an element from a distance

Another great gem from Zurb. What if you wanted to make a user aware of a piece of content long before their mouse directly hovers over its element? Perhaps it was a piece of content that a user would have never otherwise hovered over (thus rendering all that CSS you styled on the :hover of your class forever invisible to your user). What is a designer/developer to do?

Reactive Listener allows us to affect change over an element from a distance that otherwise would not be possible. In this example, we detect the proximity of the mouse pointer to an element which reacts more vibrantly the closer to user’s mouse comes to it. Here we use this effect to draw attention to some additional information contained in a hidden div, but many more practical uses abound, like drawing attention to a share button, or CTA.

The reactive listener is currently a prototype where the only real thing it knows how to watch for is mouse position, but the core concept is extensible, and we can imagine reacting to things like scroll, rotation, GPS, and a variety of other data sources.