4 ms·

I find this very exciting because it makes plausible that we can render 'infinite canvas' surfaces for user workspaces at high speed on current hardware (like m

I find this very exciting because it makes plausible that we can render 'infinite canvas' surfaces for user workspaces at high speed on current hardware (like my cheap laptop I just ran the code on), inside the browser (which makes it potentially instantly accessible across a network &cpp).

dontlaugh 4y ago
Miro has that property and I find it infuriating to use for almost any purpose. I can never find what others have drawn nearly as quickly as I can find test in a 1D document.
- DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
  This I think is a very valid concern. When a canvas with stuff on it is of infinite size, then however big your finite content is, you will not be able to find it in any limited amount of time in the general case. This effect also shows itself in the Wideboard demo: you can zoom out, locate the top end of the long text, zoom in and start reading, using cursor keys to scroll up and down (even page down does work). However there's little in the way to keep you 'on the track' as it were, as in a text editor where you're either at a specific part of one document or one part of another. Meaning that what's missing here is a lot of user interface enhancements, the idea being that you can 'lock into' a given document and see it just as in a classical application, and switch to another document without having to manually zoom out, pan, zoom in. As far as I remember it, early GUIs (early Linux desktops, OS/2, GEM) had similar problems: to many fiddly windows with too many fiddly mouse-dependent controls, to much nudging windows on the screen so they just fitted. This IMO has improved, and a barebones infinite canvas is not going to work well for a vast majority of users and use cases; you do need the guardrails, and it's probably also imperative that you can always work on that canvas just like you're working on the desktop now, only with the added benefit that now you can, if you want to, spatially arrange things, get a high-level overview, build a memory where you put things spatially, use the canvas to do a layout of a paper or a book, that sort of thing. Much like the minimap that Sublime Text (and, I think, Atom and VS Code after it) show, and similar to how applications like Inkscape work today.

dontlaugh 4y ago

Miro has that property and I find it infuriating to use for almost any purpose. I can never find what others have drawn nearly as quickly as I can find test in a 1D document.

DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
This I think is a very valid concern. When a canvas with stuff on it is of infinite size, then however big your finite content is, you will not be able to find it in any limited amount of time in the general case. This effect also shows itself in the Wideboard demo: you can zoom out, locate the top end of the long text, zoom in and start reading, using cursor keys to scroll up and down (even page down does work). However there's little in the way to keep you 'on the track' as it were, as in a text editor where you're either at a specific part of one document or one part of another. Meaning that what's missing here is a lot of user interface enhancements, the idea being that you can 'lock into' a given document and see it just as in a classical application, and switch to another document without having to manually zoom out, pan, zoom in. As far as I remember it, early GUIs (early Linux desktops, OS/2, GEM) had similar problems: to many fiddly windows with too many fiddly mouse-dependent controls, to much nudging windows on the screen so they just fitted. This IMO has improved, and a barebones infinite canvas is not going to work well for a vast majority of users and use cases; you do need the guardrails, and it's probably also imperative that you can always work on that canvas just like you're working on the desktop now, only with the added benefit that now you can, if you want to, spatially arrange things, get a high-level overview, build a memory where you put things spatially, use the canvas to do a layout of a paper or a book, that sort of thing. Much like the minimap that Sublime Text (and, I think, Atom and VS Code after it) show, and similar to how applications like Inkscape work today.