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What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

41 pointsby abelsmyesterday at 6:39 PM38 commentsview on HN

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jexeyesterday at 9:29 PM

Cofounder of a now-defunct multiplayer, real-time infinite canvas project here (Here.fm)

We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.

It was a lot of fun to hang out in as a multiplayer live video room, though, so we leaned into that with (relatively) more success.

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projektfuyesterday at 8:05 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface

They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Good luck!

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condimentyesterday at 8:29 PM

Very cool interface and reminiscent of figma/excalidraw in the way they provide an infinite 2d canvas for shapes and figures. Most tools of these types tend to implement layers as well, which might be loosely analogous to multiple desktops and could be a neat interface element to explore. The impetus for layering in a drawing tool is very different from the impetus for doing such in a desktop windowing tool.

The 3d demos are similar to what you experience when using a VR headset with desktop emulation software. I ran experiments with that for several months and while the concepts were interesting, context switching in a simulated physical space was actually a lot slower than alt+tabbing between things.

ameliusyesterday at 8:54 PM

What happens if you put all your browser tabs in two dimensions?

Answer: you get a mess.

That's why browsers weren't built like that, and also why I think this will not work.

But happy to be proven wrong of course.

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sean_pedersenyesterday at 11:03 PM

Just gave it a spin and feels very rough / unpolished. - Why is the default scroll wheel action panning vertically and not zooming in and out (the main interaction)? - Why is the app size 1GB? - Everything feels clunky / not native - these are not my real apps.

This would need a lot of work to feel frictionless but I like the concept.

swader999yesterday at 11:41 PM

The title doesn't do this justice. I would so love for this to be a finished polished product that just works.

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loboftayesterday at 7:58 PM

What I like about Niri and hyprland is that I don't need to think about where windows open and about positioning them. This then looks very tiring, but I could be wrong. Would have to play with it.

dotfragyesterday at 9:22 PM

It's basically already been said but, this seems absurd. I'm not quite sure what TRUE benefit you'd get from this but it seems more frustrating than it's worth. I can't figure out a reason to do this unless I'm just in the mood to piss myself off.

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andrewmutzyesterday at 8:27 PM

I've found that working in a style similar to this is very useful for managing multiple threads of work at the same time.

I use virtual desktops, where each desktop contains a single thing that I am working on, and everything related to it. Then any good window manager can switch between them quickly and even give you a spatial sense of where you are. I organize them as a priority stack, so the topmost priority is in top position and then it goes downward from there

There's a lot that this "campus" product does that isn't present in such a set up (multi user, zooming, etc...) but virtual desktops give you a lot of the benefit and come built in to most of our operating systems

E-Reveranceyesterday at 8:23 PM

Most similar thing to it I've seen is https://youtu.be/7q-ZhdXk3w4?t=40

_trampeltieryesterday at 11:00 PM

In the mid 90s and early 2000, all Linuxes had virtual Desktops.

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bpavukyesterday at 8:27 PM

I kinda already have this with Niri's infinite-scrolling horizontal strip and Vicinae as the control plane for complex stuff. like, to replace my Niri setup I'd need a 48:9 (!) monitor

sean_pedersenyesterday at 10:54 PM

Looks very interesting - is it open-source yet?

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ge96yesterday at 8:06 PM

SimulaVR is interesting (VR Desktop) but I was writing code in the middle of the salt lake flats super weird