[HN Gopher] Evolving the Infinite Canvas
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Evolving the Infinite Canvas
Author : pps
Score : 66 points
Date : 2023-12-26 17:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (wattenberger.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wattenberger.com)
| hyperhello wrote:
| I was impressed by the way the windows are page-local but the
| content appears as though it were screen local. I also dug the
| auto non-overlapping tiles.
|
| I think it needs a more guaranteed high frame rate and some
| polish for me to judge whether it's actually better for uses I
| make up, but it's really innovative.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm thinking the canvas is just given a fixed position and a
| low z-index and then a "normal" webpage can be made with areas
| that have a zero opacity element (or no element but then layout
| is harder).
|
| It feels super impressive but the more I think of it, I think
| the trick is actually quite simple. I wonder what edge cases
| I'm not thinking about.
| kleer001 wrote:
| Ok, but why? Please excuse my ignorance, it's well earned. I
| haven't been in the web design space for over 20 years. So,
| seriously, like, what is this for?
|
| Just so we can? For presenting a specific kind of information?
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| It's so that the topology of the design system can mirror the
| topology of the information being stored. Top-to-bottom and
| left-to-right works great for information with a linear,
| generally one-way directional flow.
|
| But how do you show that certain concepts are similar and
| related? Wiki informational design says that you should do that
| by splitting things up into atomic concepts that individually
| have a linear informational flow and using hyperlinks to
| connect them. You might group things into common categories.
|
| Links can show a connection, but not how close those
| connections are or any correlations. The idea of whiteboarding
| is that you're not limited to segmented linear information
| flows, and you can represent your thoughts visually.
|
| The "infinite canvas" is to a whiteboard what a wiki is to a
| filing cabinet of notecards. Or what a plotted graph is to a
| table of numbers.
| DecoPerson wrote:
| This appears to be exploration, to see if we can find new
| useful ways to display and interact with information.
|
| There have been many, many experiments in the past. Design
| features that work (such as listy designs, tabular designs, 2D
| designs, non-overlapping designs, etc etc) have stuck around.
| By "work", I mean that they are useful, practical, easy to
| understand, easy to implement, non-patented, etc etc.
|
| If we stop experimenting, then we will stop finding new useful
| design features and UI design will stagnate.
|
| Yes, current UI design is "good enough." But where's the fun in
| that? Whatever you believe the purpose of life is,
| experimenting and furthering humanity's knowledge is typically
| considered a good thing.
|
| I think that this particular experiment is useful, and that
| there is potential here for more efficient note-taking and
| knowledge sorting (which could, in the future, potentially
| benefit everyone). Imagine an author writing plot point ideas
| into an infinite canvas, then assembling them on the fly. And
| then they bring those points into a second canvas, where they
| group them by character. Then they can freely move the plot
| points between characters, or leave them to the side, not
| assigned to any character but there, on the "plot points by
| character" canvas, ready to be dragged on. But then if they're
| looking at the plot points on the "plot points by time" canvas,
| and they set a plot point's character to "X", then it will
| automatically move that plot point into the region of character
| "X" on the "plot points by character" canvas.
|
| That's just one example. I can imagine more, such as a
| materials researcher trying to design an industrial process.
| They could be working through potential chemical products,
| trying to decide which to use at a particular point of the
| process. This freeform canvas would let them keep a card for
| each potential choice right next to the place in the process
| that it would be used. That proximity of information could be
| useful.
|
| I've found that Blueprints (a 2D scripting language) in Unreal
| Engine get really messy, and you're constantly neatening your
| programs. This particular experiment, with its anti-overlap and
| automatic grouping features, might lead to good changes in
| Blueprints in UE that make them neater by nature.
| nicksergeant wrote:
| Infinite canvases like Figma give me infinite anxiety. There's no
| way to easily and sensibly hyperlink to specific areas/contexts
| within the canvas, and it's really difficult to find things
| unless you know exactly where to look.
|
| It's like the manifestation of a cluttered desk of papers in the
| digital world - exactly what we tried to avoid when building new
| digital interfaces for so many decades.
|
| Edit: there is a way to hyperlink directly to sections in Figma
| (see comments below), but I've never been a recipient of them
| :lol:
| cush wrote:
| > There's no way to easily and sensibly hyperlink to specific
| areas/contexts within the canvas
|
| There are absolutely ways to hyperlink to specific areas and
| contexts within the canvas. It's one of the core features
| that's always been part of Figma. For example, click on
| anything on the canvas and you'll observe the URL change. You
| can share that URL
| nicksergeant wrote:
| That does indeed work! Fascinating.
|
| Now I'm endlessly curious as to why I've never gotten a
| correctly located link from many designers in several orgs.
| It is, however, sufficiently buried that I think most
| designers just copy the browser URL and call it a day.
|
| I honestly can't remember a single time I've gotten a
| targeted Figma link like this from a designer.
| kamikaz1k wrote:
| Because people will delete and create new modes as they
| iterate so those hash links become stale. So while the
| person who replied to you is technically correct,
| effectively it is still very unstable.
| pfranz wrote:
| Similarly, on pages like GitLab you can link to specific
| line(s) of code in a file...but it often is the head of
| that branch. The URL will resolve in the future, but its
| pretty common that the chunk of code has moved.
|
| I wish it was easy to grab a URL for that specific
| version, with a banner at the top saying it's not the
| newest version of the code (something I sometimes see
| with documentation). I don't see why Figma couldn't do
| this, too.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| > Similarly, on pages like GitLab you can link to
| specific line(s) of code in a file...but it often is the
| head of that branch. The URL will resolve in the future,
| but its pretty common that the chunk of code has moved.
|
| On GitHub you can hit the 'y' key[1] and it will add the
| revision into the URL.
|
| GitLab will most probably have something similar.
|
| [1]=https://docs.github.com/en/get-
| started/accessibility/keyboar...
| andsoitis wrote:
| To be fair, you didn't figure it out either so one could
| consider this a feature discoverability issue.
|
| I didn't know either, but plan to share with my coworkers!
| nicksergeant wrote:
| > For example, click on anything on the canvas and you'll
| observe the URL change.
|
| I think this might be the problem. The URL doesn't change as
| you move around, so folks just copy the URL at the point in
| time of whatever they're staring at, and end up sharing
| whatever area was previously focused / clicked on,
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| The feature is pretty easy to use- at what point do we just
| accept that some people shouldn't be using the tool? If we
| always design for the least capable user, we will be
| unnecessarily handcuffing ourselves.
| teucris wrote:
| I used to be an infinite canvas fanatic, even building products
| that leveraged the concept, but ultimately I've abandoned it.
| There are too many issues with having an infinite canvas that
| make it untenable. This isn't to say they should never be used,
| but rather that I believe there are good reasons why they aren't
| used more.
|
| 1. Ambiguous structure - users cannot easily glean the structure
| of content from the layout alone. For instance, on an arbitrary
| canvas, you don't know if two things are close to each other to
| indicate a relation, or just for aesthetic reasons. This can be
| mitigated by ensuring relations are exposed in other ways, but
| unless everyone is _super_ strict about including an underlying
| structure, this will always be an issue. Also, without a
| representation of the underlying structure, an infinite canvas is
| fundamentally inaccessible.
|
| 2. Navigation - finding all possible content on a canvas is hard.
| This can be mitigated with something like a mini-map, but frankly
| sticking to one dimension of "infiniteness", eg scrolling, has
| shown to be the most effective for the average person to handle.
|
| 3. Implicit, but heterogeneous, affordances - when you have an
| infinite canvas, there are many more actions needed eg. pan,
| scroll, select, possibly lasso, possibly zoom...all of which need
| a mouse movement or keybinding or touch gesture, depending on the
| device and context. These all need to be discovered, or taught,
| and are often initially hidden from the view. This makes the
| learning curve far steeper, especially when users are accessing
| content from many different types of devices.
|
| 4. Responsiveness - it's hard enough to make a paragraph of text
| easily viewed on multiple screen sizes, let alone a complex
| layout of objects with relations possibly conveyed spatially.
| Infinite canvases are difficult to reformat to get a good,
| legible layout on a screen other than the one the creator used.
| There are workarounds, but they often lose information
| unintentionally by repositioning items in ways the author didn't
| anticipate.
| amelius wrote:
| Counterpoint: spreadsheets are Infinite Canvases, and are quite
| successful ...
| defart wrote:
| You are usually not dropped in the middle of a spreadsheet
| with infinite rows/cols in each direction. You start at
| topleft which makes navigating much less 'exploratory'
| evnc wrote:
| This is an interesting point, because they are kinda infinite
| spaces but they also impose a _structure_ on the space, which
| I would assert is a part of why they are so successful, in
| contrast to the "infinite structureless blank paper" that
| the OP is talking about.
|
| The trick is getting the amount of structure just right, not
| too much to be too restrictive and not so little that users
| are lost in the way the person you're replying to describes.
| rchaud wrote:
| Infinite canvases require panning and zooming with the
| mouse and tracking motion visually. A lot of users probably
| don't like the cognitive load of that compared to other
| types of apps.
|
| Excel handles this better because navigating around a large
| sheet feels more like "snapping" as there's no UI motion as
| your view zooms in and out. Plus with shortcuts like CTRL +
| rArrow, which immediately snaps your selected cell to the
| rightmost end of the current range of cells, the infinite
| canvas feels downright zippy. Excel sheets also have tabs
| that signal to the users about how they can split up their
| data instead of filling up Sheet1 with every scenario.
| Infinite canvases make you create a new file.
| dimal wrote:
| I hated this post up until the last section, then it won me over
| at the end. None of the infinite canvas interfaces look like
| anything more than a pile to me. I see no structure at all. If I
| was forced to use an interface like this for anything crucial, I
| couldn't function.
|
| But the last section that shows the same information presented in
| different formats won me over. This is more of what I'd like to
| see. Let people who think spacially work spacially if that's what
| works for them. Let the people that think however it is that I
| think work in whatever format the fits in their brain best.
| Embrace neurodiversity.
| smokel wrote:
| One nice implementation of an infinite canvas is Kinopio [1]. Not
| affiliated, just a fan.
|
| [1] https://kinopio.club/
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