Infinite Canvas • Hacker News Board

Re: Infinite Canvas

#41

Post by Tagbert » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #26

jwr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are the PDF exports vector or bitmaps?

Update: Just did a quick test and it appears that the PDF export is a vector output. You can open and edit it in Affinity Designer and likely other graphic programs and then export from then to SVG or something else.

Re: Infinite Canvas

#42

Post by waldir » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 11:48 AM UTC

topspin wrote: post #3

A useful survey of current efforts. However, I don't see what I want here: depth. The third dimension. Yes, we think visually. But we also aggressively compartmentalize. We rigorously group things into mental boxes, dig into the boxes when necessary, or stick them in our mental attic while concerns are elsewhere. There are examples of grouping and some clear hierarchies. But our mental processes are more complex. Thi…

That's why I prefer outliners. They still provide the sense of an infinitely nestable hierarchy, allow focusing on arbitrary levels of it as a temporary "root" document", and allow collapsing entire trees that are irrelevant for the current work I'm doing. But crucially, if they implement live cloning of subtrees (in Workflowy, for example, these are called "mirrors"), they can also allow a more flexible graph structure as opposed to a strictly hierarchical tree.

Of course, that misses the graphical/spatial aspect of other tools, but as josephg points out, these sometimes backfire without a natural, design-encouraged way to organize the content, and a stable frame reference. I for one don't miss the ability to organize my content spatially, even though I do that when working with physical paper. I think that's because of the limitations of the medium — i.e. I spread paper sheets out on a surface, and spread content within those sheets, because it's the only way to group content in a stable manner. The nesting system performs the same function for me in outliners.

Re: Infinite Canvas

#43

Post by agloeregrets » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:38 PM UTC

ethanbond wrote: post #35

agloeregrets wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“Knockoff” is not giving Figma its due credit. People loved Sketch, and now everyone in product design is using Figma. You think that happened by Figma being a knockoff?

I used "better" to imply it is better than Sketch. It is not an original idea but it's a great product.