Live cursors are interesting. You don't really want to be constantly sending updates but you do want the cursors to move smoothly and naturally like this. What's the trick?
Here's what it looks like without any animations.
Regular tweens/duration-based animations won't work here because each new update will "redirect" the animation. While the cursor is moving from A to B, a new update may come in that means it should move instead from its current point (C) to point D instead.
Here's what that looks like. Notice the animation always seems to be starting over—tween's just aren't designed to blend into new destinations.
A spring animation on the other hand, with its a more robust physical model, will preserve its current momentum and velocity when beginning a new animation. Pretty cool!
Figma has a “wireframe view” that might help here as a fallback, if it means keeping images etc out of memory, though it would be up to the app to switch into that. (And actually I’m not even sure if that would work)
For tldraw we have a limit of shapes per page and pages per project but it’s still theoretically possible to crash it out via memory depending on your browser.
Here's the full interaction, complete with hover indicators.
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Note that you can interact with text directly either: a) when editing text or b) when the text tool is selected. This will mean you can't create text on top of other text, but I'm guessing this is okay.
In @figma, holding shift while drawing a selection box over items will: 1. select deselected items 2. deselect selected items
Is this the right behavior? Have you ever accidentally selected / deselected items while shift-selecting?
@figma I remember working out some more complicated logic here with a rule like "if any new items are being added to the selection, don't deselect any other items"
Remind me next time to migrate the database before shipping runtime validation 💀
In tldraw’s beta db, there were lots of different versions of our data scattered around, including some from the wild times before we wrote client-side migrations, and some that just included broken data, x = NaN etc.
We’d written validation in order to catch this type of bad data when it came into the app. We didn’t write any recovery from the bad data, the app would just throw as soon as it ran into it.
The ChatGPT thing really made me appreciate how quickly AI goes from novelty to expectation. Airplane Wi-Fi phenomenon
The bar just keeps getting higher, meaning a lot of cool stuff is going to fall into the “neat? I guess?” range
Also any time that AI creates an aesthetic then the fashion demon is in the room. Those AI avatars are going to look extremely 2022, which is fine for now but not for 2023.
Another canvas battle: what happens if you start drawing a selection box and then scroll using your mouse wheel / trackpad?
Most apps only update the selection box when you move your cursor. The correct behavior (imo) is to update that selection box whenever your cursor's position in the document changes.
An app translates the cursor's screen position into document position based on where the camera is. If the camera changes (e.g. due to a scroll or zoom) then the cursor position should change too—and update that selection box!