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!
Build popular open source library, train
own model on docs + examples (some private?), guarantee that model is updated with every release, sell as integration with user IDEs
Let’s say @threejs went this route. The core product is free (wedge) but AI assisted coding environments sometimes trip over out of date versions or make poor choices based on bad examples in their training data.
The threejs team announced ThreeAssist, an “expert” model fine-tuned on each minor release, fresh docs, etc. Outscores commodity models, produces better results, guaranteed to be true to the given version, etc.
I see a lot of AI uses for the @tldraw SDK. I’d say about 25% of our customers are full on AI apps and another 30% are looking to integrate AI tools into their canvas in the future
No surprise, the most shippable / effective use cases are currently where generated artifacts can augment existing use-cases
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.