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by regus 832 days ago
What is the upside of using an infinite canvas? I tried playing around with them in the past but I think my brain's mental model of how to parse data is incompatible with "clutter" (for lack of a better term) of an infinite canvas.
2 comments
aragonite 832 days ago
Check out this video from one of my favoriate infinite canvas softwares, especially beginning around 1:25 (which I'm deep-linking to):

https://youtu.be/GblI7GI0jQ4?t=85

(Alas, the original desktop app (iMapping, in Java) as shown in the video is no longer being developed, and now they are only developing the web app (Infinitymaps) only run in the browser, which imo is not the best fit for infinite canvas apps which can be very resource-intensive)

Also see the app author's own all-purpose mega-map that he used to organize everything: https://youtu.be/bTQWL5wmdZY?si=6VrnPIErOzasisEe

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DrDeadCrash 832 days ago
Imo it would need to show varying levels of information density depending on scale. Otherwise, as another commenter stated it's overwhelming....
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Sakos 831 days ago
One of my favourite implementations is a note-taking app on Android/iOS named ZoomNotes, where you can add a "sub-canvas" anywhere that lets you click into it, taking you into a different infinite canvas. This helped me organize my information better. You could nest canvases as much as you wanted.
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allenu 832 days ago
I've always wanted to build an infinite canvas idea to try it out, but whenever I've used implementations of it (such as in the Muse app), it just feels wrong. It feels like a beautiful way to interact with essentially fractal information, but in practice it doesn't quite work to me.

I agree with you that I don't think it maps well to the mental model of the brain. Seeing the youtube video link in the sibling comment, when the user is completely zoomed out and can see everything, I just feel overwhelmed looking at it all. Maybe it's the nature of the boxes having different scales that you can't compare them as easily to each other compared to just a regular canvas where things just place in two dimensions. Each time you zoom into a canvas, the transition causes a lost sense of place and space, akin to walking into a doorway to a room and wondering why you walked there to begin with.

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