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Show HN: FlakeUI by tearflake

Show HN: FlakeUI by tearflake

16 Comments

  • Post Author
    alwa
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 2:07 pm

    It reminds me of the glory days when “hypertext” was a term uttered with a straight face to great stroking of beards—HyperCard, exercises in nonlinear narrative, VRML-based “navigation,” Apple eWorld [0] and the like.

    > Would you like to bring a touch of adventurous spirit to your contents?

    I personally would not, but I’m really glad people more adventurous than I are still exploring the periphery of UI design!

    [0] https://www.macworld.com/article/223467/remembering-eworld-a…

  • Post Author
    drops
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 2:14 pm

    a brilliant idea in the correct direction of naturally-organic UI, but the example site is rather slow in Chrome on an M3 Air

  • Post Author
    anorak27
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 2:21 pm

    Reminds me of prezi[0]. It would be great if there is an open source version of prezi similar to reveal js.

    [0] https://prezi.com/p/p6evz0gdy5dr/ux-design-tips-for-product-…

  • Post Author
    unalarmed
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 2:38 pm

    I'd like to suggest adding support for clicking and tapping for navigation. Having to drag feels unintuitive.

  • Post Author
    mindcrime
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 3:31 pm

    I really like this. And conveniently, I am just now working on creating a new personal website[1] + blog, and I could very well see using this for at least part of the site I'm building.

    The only nit that I really have is that my intuition was that I'd be able to select new "sections" (or "bubbles" or whatever they're called) by clicking or double clicking. Having to grab and drag isn't bad but it violated the "principle of least surprise" for me a little bit. But not exactly a big deal.

    [1]: https://www.philliprhodes.name

  • Post Author
    TechDebtDevin
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 3:33 pm

    Nice!

  • Post Author
    threekindwords
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 3:35 pm

    are you aware of this prior implementation [0]? it's now defunct, but may give you some ideas!

    [0] http://www.spicynodes.org

  • Post Author
    remon
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 3:37 pm

    There's a significant performance issue. There's no good reason for a few ovals and texts to stutter on my system. May be worth investigating.

  • Post Author
    kstrauser
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 3:53 pm

    Make it themeable like Gabocorp[0] and the world will beat a path to your door.

    [0]https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/gabocorp-1997

  • Post Author
    QRe
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 4:08 pm

    Kudos for building something new, fresh & exploring, experimenting.

    I don't see a scenario where this would be useful. It reminds me of exploded-view drawing but I don't see this being useful for textual content. Do you have an explicit use case? The example page, to me, looks very cluttered, overwhelming and IMO aesthetically unpleasing when reading on a mobile device.

  • Post Author
    runoisenze
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 4:19 pm

    Nice work. I wonder how the experience would be in VR.

  • Post Author
    settsu
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 6:47 pm

    This reminds me of the time a few years ago when mind mapping sites and apps exploded into popularity among the… "technorati" and sort of slightly seep into the wider online awareness but then seemingly, just as quickly, disappear into the background noise of the internet (I'm terminally online to a degree, especially when it comes to tech news—and have a pretty decent general awareness of pop culture trends—and can't recall having seen the topic referenced since the trend faded. But perhaps I'm just not in the right circles?)

  • Post Author
    lacoolj
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 7:02 pm

    Seems to be a navigational flaw here – you can't get to any of the intermediate "sections" without manually going back one by one (other than "Home" to get to the absolute top)

    Otherwise, this is pretty cool and would be great for one-way traversing (maybe a quiz/test would do well here)

  • Post Author
    einpoklum
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 7:03 pm

    I tried the example site. The way this notion is implemented right now, I don't see a benefit. One can barely see anything in the nodes other than the main one; nor can one distinguish them. TBH, even a tree of notes with titles, with collapse/expand controls, would probably have been more useful in emphasizing what FlakeUI offers.

    Verdict: thumb down.

    But – perhaps the example is only partial and perhaps this will develop into something more meaningful.

  • Post Author
    chris_pie
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 9:20 pm

    This is very similar to the idea of Zooming User Interfaces (ZUI) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface

  • Post Author
    waingake
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 11:27 pm

    Have you seen / did you create this series on youtube? The final video lands on something very similar to this. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsfH1Ahi4SzE-QmrsrtyZubGm…

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