John McLear asks:

Any info available comparing {Quicksand and Isotope}? Both seem to "tick my box"

First off, I need to give Jacek Galanciak the credit he deserves. Without Quicksand, I would have never found inspiration to build filtering into jQuery Masonry, and subsequently build Isotope into its own filtering and sorting machine. Mr. Razorjack did a superb job of mimicking Mac OS X's animated filters. It was his idea from the beginning and I'm grateful that he brought it to life. Jacek has been credited front and center in the Introduction to Isotope.

My issue with Quicksand is that I never knew how to implement it. To be honest, I've never actually attempted using it. From what I understand, you need to provide duplicate mark up for the group you wish to display. That is: one group for the filtered, one group for all of items, another group for sorted items. There is a way with to filter and sort using only one set of markup with Quicksand, but it requires a fair amount of custom jQuery script to get it working.

As a jQuery user, I was unsatisfied with Quicksand's implementation. The user should not be responsible for building all the sorting and filtering logic. It should be built into the plugin itself. Developing Isotope, I aimed to make filtering and sorting accessible to any user.

I would say ease of use is the principal difference between Quicksand and Isotope. To filter a group with Isotope, you only need to pass in a jQuery selector string to the filter option:

$('#container').isotope({ filter: '.foo' });

But the differences extend beyond that. Here's a list of features you get with Isotope that aren't currently in Quicksand:

• Progressive enhancement on animations with CSS transitions and hardware acceleration when available
• Multiple layout modes
• Caches item elements for better performance
• Plenty of convenient methods
• Plays nice with Infinite Scroll

At first glance, the two plugins are remarkable similar. But I feel once you try putting one into use, it will become clear what Isotope can offer.