Question

I have my object tracking the mouse using the onmousemove event. But I would like to make it smooth. I’m sure this can’t be difficult in jQuery but I’m not finding any really good resources.

One idea I had was to simply use the animate function and calculating the offsets that I want to move to. Then if the mouse moves again before the animation is complete, I would use the stop function to stop the animation. I would recalculate my destination and away I go again. This seems a little hack-ish and I also imagine that it will be a little jerky. I’m sure there has to be a better way. Any Ideas?

EDIT
Sorry I didn’t make my problem very clear. I have the object tracking the mouse in real time, so that it moves exactly the same as my mouse. The problem is that I want it to be smooth and lag behind with acceleration effects like Andy Lin mentioned below. I’m just a little lost how to actually implement this.

Answer 1

I am afraid, that there is no better way, than animate. If you add a smoothing function, then you would simply do the same thing that animate does. Be sure, not to queue your animations or they will look weird. I got nice results with this:

var obj = $('<div style="width:50px;height:50px;background:red;position:absolute"></div>');

obj.appendTo(document.body);

$(document).bind('mousemove',function(ev){
 obj.animate({top:ev.pageY,left:ev.pageX},{queue:false,duration:200,easing:'linear'})});