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Show HN: Scrawl

demos.samgentle.com

34 pointssgentle13 comments

This is excellent. I spend a lot of time doodling procedurally - coming up with unexpected patterns by following strict rules as to how lines can be drawn in relation to a previous line. This automates the tedious part of that and makes it easier to be creative.

I am a little lost, I am able to add things to the bar by clicking, and I can change the node growth rules by selecting the menu of shapes on the side, but what is the use case? What am supposed to be able to do with this project? Even a one sentence modal would be greatly appreciated, or a help div, or something.

I wouldn't say it has a use case per se, it's more of a toy. I hear you, though - I've added an info link down the bottom right that leads to https://github.com/sgentle/scrawl, where there is some more information.

I can think of a bunch, mostly all revolving around replacing Visio and OmniGraffle. Exposing an API service shouldn't be too difficult considering the fluent style you modeled your own internal API. Make that and/or allowing people to upload their own stylesheets a premium feature. Having two panes like this[1] where I can declaratively chart things out, and have you take care of the styling and I'd be a paying customer. and/or having some aesthetically pleasing UI right out of the box would make this my go-to tool.

Use cases - --this could be a fantastic tool for diagramming components, whether you want to Mindmap something to make concrete what only a concept in your mind. --Modelling out infrastructure (maybe dynamically querying whatever status service you have to generate a dashboard ...again a premium feature) --Modelling out entities --Integrate it with Jupyter (formerly Python Notebook) as a premium feature. --(This is admittedly a wanky feature that someone in marketing would come up with, but if you want user adoption what I'd do is leverage the existing 'standard env' and build around it) i.e. Have it hook into Github or Slack and on a build failure (likely in your AWS Docker instance!) ping the person who broke the build and have a bot that announces in the startup's Slack-room to shame him/her along with some wanky dependency graph (just diff the last known build and walk up the prototype chain).

I'm speaking maybe 20% in jest, 80% in 'you can really cobble together a product like that and tie Stripe into it'. Visio needs to die. I was working on something similar myself (a little more limited in scope) but got distracted.

Just a feature suggestion - localize the hot-keys for shapes into something one can reach with solely their left hand, so as to free up their right hand for mouse actions. Between use the keys 'asdfgwerv' as main menu items (e.g. triangles, squares, etc), then associate each of those components with one of those keys, which when pressed will open up a sub-menu (regular triangles, isosceles, etc) accessible by the same keys.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/TBUycHc.png Something like that, where onKeypressUp pane_2 renders the contents of pane_1.

This is neat. I wish there was a way to zoom in/out of the canvas area, so I could go deeper with my fractals.

Good point, I've added mousewheel zooming now. I'd been putting off adding zooming but it really does make it nicer. Thanks for the feedback!

What shape are you using for creating fractals?

Sadly this is what I see when I visit your site: https://anonm.gr/up/d654.png

I tried to solve the captcha several times, before giving up. This will happen to all users that try to visit your site using Tor.

Hm, how frustrating. I've seen that issue before on my own VPN and I think it's something to do with the interaction between Cloudflare's security cookie and my site, but it's tricky to reproduce. I'm trying it using the Tor Browser now and it seems to be working.

If all else fails you can try https://sgentle.github.io/scrawl/

In order to see your screen shot of a captcha, I have to solve a captcha. :/

EDIT: (controls were unintuitive on tablet/mobile) It seems like you need to select the shape then tap on the line you want to apply it to. One tap previews the change, a second tap on the same line applies the change; tapping elsewhere cancels applying it.

For those who want to read up on it: https://github.com/sgentle/scrawl/

The keyboard doesn't work for me on Debian/Iceweasel.

Oops. I have no idea how I missed that. I even tested it on Firefox. Fixed now, thanks.

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