That’s just not true. I’m from Europe but lived in Boulder for several years. For example this shooting (1) happened 5 min walking distance from my home. My kids’ school had several lockdowns due to gun-related stuff in the neighborhood. Something like that is unimaginable in Europe, and big part of why we moved back.
(co-founder of Whimsical here) Thanks for the mention! Couple fun facts - Whimsical is written 100% in Clojure and we are self-funded (https://whimsical.com/business/why-bootstrap/).
I'm on Linux and just signed up. How do you pan around? The arrow keys work, but opposite the direction I'd expect. Don't see any panning tool obvious. Is the use case touchpads like on a Mac?
You can pan by holding down Space key (and then use mouse to drag the board). In general Whimsical's UX patterns are quite similar to Figma, Sketch and other UI design tools.
Thanks for the mention! We built Whimsical for a simple reason - all the existing diagramming apps had poor UX. It didn't feel like any of them were really optimized to visualize ideas as quickly as possible while make the result look decent.
Similar story here - started with DraftJS but it was kind of cumbersome. Slate in comparison is much more flexible and we've been using it in production for almost a year now. In fact we just launched a sticky notes project management tool which features a smooth rich text editing based on slate https://whimsical.co/sticky-notes/
So, I have to ask why whimsical.co's navigation is so counter-intuitive? Why do arrow keys move the screen the opposite direction, and why is there no drag and drop? I am not trying to be aggressive, I just want to understand the design decision?
It's an extension to re-frame that we built. It addresses some of the (subjective) shortcomings of re-frame, mainly the over-reliance on keywords. We'll be open-sourcing it soon.
Indeed, most of the application logic is in client side. In fact it's built in a way that it could function as a standalone application without backend. Currently it doesn't persist the data locally but that could be easily added.
The backend serves as a fairly generic datastore with an API that allows data to be easily synced back and forth. It implements a logic (again non-specific to Whimsical) for how to handle concurrent updates (basically it implements CRDTs). I believe it's pretty similar to Google's Cloud Firestore - we might have chosen that if it was out of beta and we didn't mind the lock-in.
Two main reasons we did this:
1) to be able to easily add offline mode - we don't have it yet but it's fairly easy to add now
2) to minimize effect of network latency on user experience
As for less load on server & cheaper infrastructure costs - you are right, that is another benefit.
We use combination of Redis pub/sub and Websockets. Each document has a unique key and whenever any of the users/clients make a change to it, it's published via that key. Other clients connect via WebSockets to backend and subscribe to the same key in Redis. The notifications are fairly simple.
The complex part is how we sync actual data from clients to server while ensuring consistency. We basically store all data in a tree format and having a diffing logic how concurrent changes can be applied conflict-free in most cases. I'm considering writing a separate post on that.
HackFwd was one of the rare accelerators that was actually pushing the envelope instead of being copycats. Besides they had another rare trait in this space - integrity and deep commitment to companies they fund (disclaimer - I'm the founder of one of those companies).
A/B testing is not necessarily a binary thing, you could use it for prioritization too. You could still display the video on the landing page (= default), with a small, tiny, barely visible button/text that directs the curious user to the page with text and illustrations.
Video and the app look fantastic though, best of luck. I almost never watch a video too, but I watched it this time and liked it a lot.
"me too" for the text + illustration option. I have work, kids etc etc so I want to learn what it is at my pace, not at a pre-determined unknown "I wonder how long this video is and what level its pitched at" kind of pace.
Me too. I also hit the back button since I didn't want to watch a video. Would have been good enough with a link to some textual explanation and images.
> I loathe seeing *.html in urls and that's the only thing you can do with S3 root object
You can configure name of index file, and that will be displayed for requests against root URL and subdirectories (such as blog posts) as well. No need for having .html in URLs.
The only problem I've encountered with S3 web hosting is that it does not let you host naked domains.
Naked domains as in "example.com" without the www? Just name your bucket without the www and it will work. You can then do a javascript redirect from a simple index page at www.example.com (google has said that they now follow javascript redirects. My play example "http://whitewatersearch.com
1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Boulder_shooting