Live data from Hacker News

Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#22

I have great respect for people pursuing their special interests with such perseverance - you clearly care about zooming UIs. And so do I (just to a lesser extent)! It’s a great way to express hierarchy. One thing I encountered is that it becomes all buggy after using the slide-back navigation gesture in iOS Safari. Yet this being natively handles would be a really cool thing to me, like those iOS “close back to thum…

That means a lot, thanks. The iOS back gesture thing is tricky but would be really sweet to pull off.

Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#24
Really cool, like others are saying this makes you feel like you are interacting with all the pages at once instead of one page at a time.

I did notice that forward doesn't seem to work. I.E. If I click into a page, it zooms in, press back it zooms back out, press forward it flickers the url but doesn't have normal forward behavior.

I also don't know if you want to support `open in new tab` but that would be a hard req for many people.

Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#25

Love it. But there is a significant usability issue: Lack of signifier (aka affordance). How do I known when something is zoomable? Because there is no signifier, I am frequently disappointed when I click on something and it turns out it is not zoomable.

Fair point. No visual cue for what's zoomable is a real gap. Thinking about how to handle that without cluttering the UI.

Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#26

Love it. But there is a significant usability issue: Lack of signifier (aka affordance). How do I known when something is zoomable? Because there is no signifier, I am frequently disappointed when I click on something and it turns out it is not zoomable.

that would be more on the consumer of the library than on the library imo.

Like I wouldn't expect any other frontend router library to decorate links for me in a certain way.

Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#27

I'd say this is more of an interesting take on page transitions. I was expecting mouse wheel scroll to zoom, so I instinctively scrolled expecting some kind of zooming effect. I remembered there was a website featured here on HN that had an interactive tour of the scale of the universe ranging from the very microscopic world (if I remember correctly I think it even went down to Planck length) all the way to the macro…

Yeah the scroll expectation comes up a lot. Scale of the Universe was scijs I think, different beast but a great example of zoom done right.

Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#30

Doesn't work correctly in Firefox. Feels sluggish, but maybe this could be fixed by reducing the transition time. But why? People usually don't notice such transition effects and it doesn't affect user experience in any meaningful positive way. It feels absolutely unnecessary. Maybe you could re-use it as a mod for some game engine. This feels appropriate for video games; not for web-sites.

Firefox issues are real and I want to fix them. On the "why", fair to be skeptical, it's not for every UI. But I do think it makes sense when hierarchy needs to feel spatial.
Post reply on HN