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Show HN: Ballpoint.io

ballpoint.io

65 pointsartursapek10 comments

I love how it lets you immediately jump in. These easy-to-access and use online tools are great. It's frustrating how tough it can be to find the right image manipulation tool; will add this to my toolbag.

This is amazing, especially compared to the way my machine is brought low by Inkscape.

(I know Inkscape has a lot more features, but just loading one image + adding text on top should not lag a 2 GHz Quad-Core / 8GB machine.)

I couldn't load an image with this, though. Overall, it's lacking many features, too many to be useful. Key feature missing are keyboard commands, efficient ways to convert bezier handles (smooth to corner).

I use Sketch, and I highly recommend it.

As per Sketch, I used to love it when I was on a Mac, then I switched to Windows and since there's no Sketch for windows I switched to Lunacy (Windows only), a completely free native app that's 100% compatible with Sketch and that's equally good, if not better. I simply kept working on the same files and it just works, impressive.

That’s also impressive from the Sketch side, as they apparently made their file format so easy to parse/use that another program can read them without any issues.

"Just loading one image" is rarely "just" that if it brings your machine to a crawl. I find Inkscape works well for vector graphics.

If you are dealing with big bitmaps (eg. 108 megapixels of s20 ultra at 24 bits per pixel requires at least 324 of MB of memory if it was encoded without any metadata, but I am sure even bitmap processing software like Photoshop will multiply that by a large factor, let alone vector image editors). Full A4 page scan at 600dpi is ~35 megapixels and at 1200dpi 140 megapixels.

Sure, we can easily think of ways to optimize this (eg only load a preview image for the current zoom level, and when changing zoom level, take the online map tile zooming approach and load in the background), but when dev resources are scarce, you focus on your core competence (vector editing with Inkscape).

I can't believe how good that is, browser apps have come a long way.

Well, let me tell you.. http://www.quakejs.com/

This loads fast and is very responsive, unlike other browser apps I've used that try to offer an alternative to native apps (Google Docs comes to mind). I like it!

Figma is a cross-platform equivalent and it's free for personal use (figma.com) work's in your browser and is quite fast actually

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