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Infinite Canvas

infinitecanvas.tools

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21–30 of 43 posts

Re: Infinite Canvas

#21

Post by pavlov »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #8

I don't understand the value proposition of ZUI. Yes, I think visually, but I tend to remember things as atoms, or as narratives. An atom might be "CBC means Cipher Block Chaining", a narrative might be, "you take your plaintext and split it into blocks, then you take your IV and XOR it with your first block, then you XOR block n with the block n-1". I'm not sure that a graph data structure adds value. What's the val…

It sounds like you’re thinking about recording facts. The CBC algorithm doesn’t change and doesn’t contain human uncertainties.

Designing or planning something is different. You want to record options, potential paths that may not be taken, input from various people with different viewpoints. A graph structure can help manage that by making the branching and grouping more explicit.

Re: Infinite Canvas

#23

Post by jwr »

josephg wrote: post #20

Just as a counterpoint: I've been really enjoying goodnotes on the ipad lately. GoodNotes is a notetaking app which is not an infinitely zoomable canvas. And I love it. (I'm not affiliated in any way, I'm just a huge fan). Goodnotes documents are essentially paper notepads that you can write in. New pages are added to the document as you need them (usually by swiping right from the last page). I've tried a couple inf…

Goodnotes is a great app, I've been using it for years.

But it has two big usability issues:

1. Your documents are not organized spatially. They are dumped in a way that is convenient for application developers to implement. This means that every time you launch an app with an idea in your head, you spend time and mental effort on finding the document that you want to open. By the time you get there, the idea is often gone.

2. Its "paper" isn't screen-sized. Seems silly? Perhaps — but on my iPad Pro about 10% of screen space is wasted on "margins" just because their "paper" isn't the right size. If you don't implement an infinite canvas, that's fine, but then provide a way to quickly take notes on "pages" without zooming, panning, or otherwise fiddling, and provide a way to use all of the screen.

I feel like we underestimate the power of simple and the power of spatial organization.

Re: Infinite Canvas

#24

Post by jwr »

"We think spatially" — this is true! So why do most of our apps and operating systems insist on ignoring that and dump stuff on us in a programmer-convenient way?

The Mac desktop remembers icon/folder positions — and people love it! That's why it's used for so many things and why you so often see unbelievably busy/cluttered desktops. So why can't other apps and OSs do the same? Windows insists on losing my desktop arrangement regularly. Apps and file managers show table views. File-Open windows show (tiny) table views with inscrutable navigation. And even the Mac, which used to be spatially-organized, can't even be bothered to remember window positions correctly.

Re: Infinite Canvas

#25

Post by marcinignac »

coldblues wrote: post #15

It would be awesome if someone actually built an infinite canvas application that didn't run on the browser, so that you could actually use it effectively. Currently, the majority of infinite canvas applications begin to noticeably lag and stutter after a while, and start to have syncing inconsistencies especially in their "multiplayer" mode.

If you are on Mac then there is one called Muse (https://museapp.com/) by the authors of the site in this thread and it's as smooth as you would expect.

Re: Infinite Canvas

#26

Post by josephg »

jwr wrote: post #23
josephg wrote: post #20

Just as a counterpoint: I've been really enjoying goodnotes on the ipad lately. GoodNotes is a notetaking app which is not an infinitely zoomable canvas. And I love it. (I'm not affiliated in any way, I'm just a huge fan). Goodnotes documents are essentially paper notepads that you can write in. New pages are added to the document as you need them (usually by swiping right from the last page). I've tried a couple inf…

Goodnotes is a great app, I've been using it for years. But it has two big usability issues: 1. Your documents are not organized spatially. They are dumped in a way that is convenient for application developers to implement. This means that every time you launch an app with an idea in your head, you spend time and mental effort on finding the document that you want to open. By the time you get there, the idea is ofte…

Yep. I also tried to use it recently to draw some diagrams for a blog post and discovered (to my horror) that there's no nice way to export the diagrams for publishing. I'd like either SVGs or, failing that, PNGs with transparency. The only options are as a series of JPEGs (with a white background) or a PDF. What a hassle.

Re: Infinite Canvas

#28

Post by agloeregrets »

coldblues wrote: post #15

It would be awesome if someone actually built an infinite canvas application that didn't run on the browser, so that you could actually use it effectively. Currently, the majority of infinite canvas applications begin to noticeably lag and stutter after a while, and start to have syncing inconsistencies especially in their "multiplayer" mode.

Lol.

Their key example is Figma…which is, effectively, a better knockoff of the native Sketch mac desktop app. It had that infinite canvas first.

Re: Infinite Canvas

#29

Post by agloeregrets »

pixel_tracing wrote: post #19

I’d be curious to know how one actually implements infinite canvas? I guess would you: 1. Initially set a default window size and scale the window to that? 2. Track if the user is zooming in and out and based on the zoom factor scale all the windows contents based on that?

I get the impression that it kinda is like Minecraft: you have a 0,0 position and a scale factor. On a 1440p 100% scale display the bottom right corner would be position 2560,1440. When you zoom the position becomes 2560* scale factor by 1440 * scale factor.

Then, during rendering, all size values just hit that scale factor.

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