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Comment by TN1ck | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a startup where the goal was to build a tool to create stories similar to NYT without needing a coder. We got quite far, and the articles done with it are already quite impressive. The task is really difficult though - performance is hard and responsiveness is super tricky. I’m proud that we didn’t end up with scrolljacking and it fells quite web native. https://info.graphics is the current soft launch and has some cool stories of anyone is interested.

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Scrolljacking - first time I heard that word. Is this about those one-page-websites where you scroll two lines down and then without any control it goes down one page? The person who invented this should be banned from the internet for at least a year.

yes but maybe for ten years. The inventor didn't own a mac, probably had Windows XP with an old or bad touchpad and decided that his JS will help fix smooth scrolling that is missing on many browsers. Since then browsers have caught up, but idiotic wordpress templates are still including scrolljackers because, the WP template designers, are long out of the WP business and no new templates are available...

I know you don't work there anymore, but that really doesn't feel "web native".

Front page images load several seconds after they're scrolled into view. I looked at the moon story and it was frozen for about 10 seconds before a start button appeared. In the story I can scroll, but it's about 5fps, and the blue dots and the secondary map are glitching on/through the moon.

I am using a relatively new smartphone, a galaxy s8, something with more power than most average consumers have (most people have a cheap budget phone, not the latest iPhone).

The format definitely was interesting tho, I can see the potential of these types of tools.

Currently the stuff is hosted in AWS Frankfurt, maybe that? Normally it should load pretty fast, the lazy loading is just an optimisation for the users. Yes, I have to admit, that loads pretty slow and the performance is not good. The problem is - I can try to make the performance as good as possible, designers still tend to want super high res textures / high fidelity 3d objects as they tend to put visual quality over performance. They have beefy machines and so don't really notice.

What do you consider scrolljacking? I opened the breakfast article and saw some scrolljacking right away.

Is my understanding mistaken here?

That story feels like scrolljacking because there is a mismatch from the scrolling and the background animation, it's a pretty free tool, so the designer decided to have easings like that. But you're still scrolling normally, the background is just animating. Normally we have html text boxes, where you feel that you're scrolling normally. Not in this story though.

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