[HN Gopher] Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I bu...
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Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something
different
There are essentially two established ways to use zooming in web
interfaces today. They serve different purposes and make different
tradeoffs. I built a third one, so I'll try to be fair about what
each does well and where it falls short. * Prezi Prezi pioneered
the zooming canvas for presentations and remains the market leader
in that space. It recently added AI-powered generation and text
editing tools. It's a polished product with real traction. But
Prezi is a closed platform, not a library. You can't use its zoom
engine in your own app. Pricing starts at $15/month for meaningful
features, and exporting to PowerPoint flattens all zoom effects
into static slides. A recurring complaint from users is that the
zooming and panning transitions cause motion sickness. And
fundamentally, Prezi uses zoom as a storytelling device between
pre-arranged frames. It's not a navigation model. It's a
presentation model. * impress.js impress.js brought Prezi-like
zooming to the open web. It's a presentation framework based on
CSS3 transforms and transitions, directly inspired by Prezi. It was
genuinely groundbreaking when it launched. Its architecture is
step-based: you position "steps" in 3D space and the camera moves
between them. That's great for presentations, but it doesn't help
you build an app where users navigate by zooming into content.
impress.js has no concept of dynamically mounting views, managing
zoom depth, or handling navigation state. It's a slide deck engine
with a zoom trick. * Zumly This is what I built. Full disclosure:
I'm the sole developer. The idea is offering an alternative to
traditional page navigation using zooming. You mark an element as
zoomable, point it to a view, and Zumly handles the transition and
inserts new views. That's basically it. I started Zumly in 2020
after leaving behind Zircle UI (a Vue zooming library), trying to
take what I learned further. Framework-agnostic, focused just on
the zoom part. Since then I've rewritten the engine several times,
changed the approach more than once. Only now I'm actually happy
with how it feels. Views are dynamically mounted and unmounted
during zoom transitions. In impress.js, all steps exist in the DOM
simultaneously. In Zumly, you zoom into a trigger element, and the
target view gets injected and scaled into place. This is closer to
how routing works in SPAs than to how slide decks work. The
landing page is built with Zumly itself so you can get the feel
before touching any code. Curious if anyone else has thought about
this space. What makes zooming UIs work or fail? Landing page
(built with Zumly): https://zumerlab.github.io/zumly GitHub:
https://github.com/zumerlab/zumly
Author : tinchox6
Score : 68 points
Date : 2026-04-06 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
| tosti wrote:
| This looks seriously impressive. Also, I wonder what the a11y
| implications are. I don't miss Macromedia Flash hell at all. This
| is HTML5, so with a bit of effort it could look beautiful and
| still cater to the visually impaired.
|
| Edit: I can't scroll any of the showcases. Probably deliberate,
| but a cut-off UI can be annoying.
|
| Edit2: I opened the yellow car on the production line and going
| back the page got all offscreen and looks messed up
| tinchox6 wrote:
| Thanks! The a11y angle is something I want to tackle properly.
| Noted the bugs too, the car one is a known issue.
| drob518 wrote:
| Interesting. At one point I pinched my iPad to zoom out of habit
| and it got very confused. But yea, interesting.
| tinchox6 wrote:
| Ha, noted. Pinch conflicts are a known pain point on touch
| devices, need to sort that out.
| sijmen wrote:
| Interesting way to use zooming as a way to transition deeper into
| sub-dashboards. The navigation from "Mission Control" ->
| "Satellite" -> "Subsystem" feels oddly intuitive and fun. I would
| maybe opt for keeping a consistent navbar/sidebar, to support
| out-of-zoom navigation. And if we are dealing with a lot of
| power-users some breadcrumb to quickly go back to any zoom-level.
| But overall, i think this could totally work.
| tinchox6 wrote:
| Appreciate it! Breadcrumbs and back navigation are definitely
| on my radar.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Would suggest using history-api navigation over the hash based
| routing.
| tinchox6 wrote:
| Good call, hash routing was the quick path. History API is on
| the list.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| 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.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I have the exactly opposite view, possibly with the same amount
| of conviction. It feels _very_ necessary to communicate
| hierarchy and where things are coming from and going. It
| communicates a lot of important information and continuity. In
| real life, you don't have things suddenly appearing and
| disappearing all the time. That's not how our brains are
| conditioned.
| jvdvegt wrote:
| Weird, seems to work fine in Firefox on Android.
| tinchox6 wrote:
| 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.
| solarkraft wrote:
| 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 thumbnail" gestures you sometimes see when
| scrolling up/down that I haven't really seen replicated anywhere
| else.
| tinchox6 wrote:
| That means a lot, thanks. The iOS back gesture thing is tricky
| but would be really sweet to pull off.
| mochidusk wrote:
| 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 macroscopic (black
| holes, galaxies). I'd be interested in such a zooming library
| that achieves something like that.
| tinchox6 wrote:
| 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.
| epaga wrote:
| I really love this (and miss the days when Prezi was simple and
| straightforward).
|
| I've written an app myself along sort-of similar lines, but it's
| less a presentation app and more a thought organizer (works on
| all Apple platforms). https://mindscopeapp.com
|
| I think what proved key for my own "zoomable" UI was cross-
| linking, search, and speed/snappiness. Make the animations too
| heavy and it just slows you down. Zumly seems really great in
| this regard. Well done!
| tinchox6 wrote:
| Thanks! Speed was a big focus, glad it comes through. Your app
| looks really cool btw.
| tzm wrote:
| I think zooming is effective when it's used in isolation for
| discrete things. It does add a sense of delight, but there is a
| functional usefulness of this that I'm trying to wrap my head
| around.. perhaps a transition effect for an immersive demo, etc..
| nice work.
| tinchox6 wrote:
| Thanks! Yeah, immersive demos and dashboards are where it seems
| to click best.
| eisfresser wrote:
| The Home Assistant showcase looks fabulous.
| tinchox6 wrote:
| Glad you liked it! That one was fun to build.
| lateforwork wrote:
| 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.
| tinchox6 wrote:
| Fair point. No visual cue for what's zoomable is a real gap.
| Thinking about how to handle that without cluttering the UI.
| ericmcer wrote:
| 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.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| This is indeed seriously impressive. I keep wanting to keep my
| entire knowledgebase on a canvas so that I can "think" or
| navigate spatially. Thisis neat.
|
| In the main landing page, as I was clicking around, I kept
| wishing to have a legend to show me either "how deep I am" or
| "how do I get out of here?", and like someone else commented, I
| would love an affordance showing me what was clickable/zoomable.
| tinchox6 wrote:
| Thanks! Both the depth indicator and the zoomable affordance
| are things I'm actively working on. Glad the spatial navigation
| idea resonates.
| cjlm wrote:
| I think about this space a lot, see Eagle Mode:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6yPQKt3mBA
| ericmcer wrote:
| 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.
| tinchox6 wrote:
| Good catch on forward navigation. Architecturally I don't keep
| a history of already-visited views, so forward has nowhere to
| go. It's something worth tackling though, especially for
| programmatic navigation flows. Open in new tab is on my radar
| too.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Under the hood aren't you pushing things into the browser
| history as navigation happens? I wouldn't try to rewrite the
| history api myself but just make sure you `pushState()` as
| navigation happens.
| theflyinghorse wrote:
| HA! I Love it! It's a been a while since I felt this sort of joy
| exploring a new way to navigate
| kabir_daki wrote:
| "Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built
| something different"
| christoff12 wrote:
| > remains the market leader in that space
|
| TIL
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(page generated 2026-04-06 23:00 UTC)