Apparatus: graphics editor and programming environment for interactive diagrams | Hacker News Reader

Apparatus: graphics editor and programming environment for interactive diagrams

aprt.us

133 pointsjarmitage14 comments

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Definitely influenced by Bret Victor's talk/prototype: http://worrydream.com/#!/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalk

And credited so: http://aprt.us/#development

Looks cool, on a plane without a PC. Will have to try it out when I land.

Even this image has Bret listed as author: http://aprt.us/editor/?load=doc/examples/Star.json

Also this one which is amazing: http://aprt.us/editor/?load=doc/examples/Potted%20Plant.json

I can only hugely commend the creators. Interactive charts for pedagogical purposes are a big win for me, as I work in a fairly complex domain where a moving picture can make all the difference between understanding immediately, and having to explain a static chart with 1000 long words. This beats animated gifs hands down and in my personal opinion, the interface is beautiful. Kudos and looking forward to embeddable.

All of this stuff is coming out of SAP Labs. They've got some truly awesome people doing great work there.

http://www.cdglabs.org

This could be the best thing ever.

I'm a guy who types in SVG diagrams manually. They're normally simple enough and it's easier to get the alignments when you type in the coordinates. But tools like this could change it. I'll keep eyes on this. Thanks for sharing.

Yes! I've looked for something like this. I would love to use this to build UI on iOS. So far you have to resort to Paintcode that generates code but I rather have something agnostic.

Why doesn't it have an undo key?

There's an undo menu item.

It's kind of cute. It's more like a proof of concept, or minimal viable product, at this point. Bring it up to the level of Inkscape, so you can do most of the things .svg files can represent, and it will be useful.

(Inkscape is a great piece of free software, one of the few pieces of free graphics software on Linux that doesn't come from a command line mindset. Also runs on Windows and Mac.)

Inkscape is awesome. Unfortunately one of the things its used for _a lot_ is designing for a laser cutter which is _not_ it's strong point: it can't really do precise stuff like you can in Solidworks with dimensioning and relations. I'd love an OSS solution for vector drawing that has dimensioning and relations, if anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them.

Maybe Antimony[1]?

[1]: http://www.mattkeeter.com/projects/antimony/3/

True. Inkscape, unfortunately, doesn't really understand dimensions. Internally, it uses "px" as a unit, although SVG understands "mm" and "in". Corel Draw is more serious about dimensions and units, which is needed when you're talking to a laser cutter. SVG users have asked for the opposite feature: roundoff to pixel boundaries, instead of floating point coordinates.[1] SVG's internal representation is a text string of a number with a decimal point, but it's up to the program writing the file to decide how many digits to put after the decimal point. And, of course, you'll get rounding errors going back and forth from text representation to internal floating point representation.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/951655

FreeCAD, http://www.freecadweb.org I do basically all my CAD in it. For 3d-print, laser and milling, roughly in that order. For laser/millling you can either work directly with parametric 2d ("Part Design"), or work in 3d and then export 2d outlines (my preferred way).

I think the Browser uses the under key for form fields. So the javascript doesn't see the ctrl+z events.

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