by pps on 12/26/23, 5:49 PM with 34 comments
by teucris on 12/27/23, 6:01 PM
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.
by rsweeney21 on 12/28/23, 12:50 AM
Unfortunately, all the demo videos were uploaded to Microsoft's YouTube competitor, which is now gone. But here's a video demo of Seadragon to give you an idea of what it was like:
by dimal on 12/27/23, 6:48 PM
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.
by smokel on 12/27/23, 9:58 PM
by hyperhello on 12/27/23, 4:45 PM
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.
by nicksergeant on 12/27/23, 5:43 PM
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:
by bkyan on 12/30/23, 10:24 PM
Here is a screenshot of one of such app that I'm currently working on:
http://shadowcatcher.mindcast.com/imgShow.php?clip=way757yrh...
by gherkinnn on 12/27/23, 11:56 PM
Infinite canvases match the way I think. Back in the day, I would use Illustrator over Photoshop for UI work, as it gave me a (near) infinite canvas on which to doodle and explore. Sketch and now Figma continued this approach so I can't be alone here.
by kleer001 on 12/27/23, 5:18 PM
Just so we can? For presenting a specific kind of information?
by shove on 12/28/23, 11:02 PM
by DrDeadCrash on 12/28/23, 3:12 AM
I wonder if something like this could be useful if paired with a Tree-like panel for navigation and some selection aware auto-arrange functionality.
by closetkantian on 12/28/23, 10:46 AM
by smusamashah on 12/28/23, 3:08 AM
