Show HN: I built Grafar, a visualization library | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built Grafar, a visualization library

thoughtspile.github.io

212 pointsthoughtspile24 comments

This looks neat! I think you really need a gallery page that shows all the kinds of things that are possible.

Is there a way to make the background transparent, so you just see the page background behind the plot? I have a project that needs that, and for 2D plots we're doing it with JSXGraph, but for 3D we've been using GeoGebra so far, and the figures look like something else embedded rather than an intrinsic part of the page.

You can style the container via CSS. There is actually a huge pile of examples in the repo: https://github.com/thoughtspile/grafar/tree/master/examples Some of them are for older versions and need to be updated, and I just couldn't find a quick way to slap a gallery into the docs, but I might get to it someday.

It's definitely worth getting a gallery working. I'm absolutely the target market for this and I really want to see it in action... but not quite enough to checkout code, run yarn and get the demos working on my own laptop.

Some feedback: show me the result on the front page. It’s a vis lib, but you’re not showing any of the visualizations (at least on mobile). The code sandbox is ok, but it has no context or description (again, mobile).

Neat lib.

Ah, you must've hit a script load race condition — I thought that would be pretty rare. Should be fixed now, thanks for the feedback!

I’m on ios/safari, no visualization on the linked page, and the links to the tutorial and api docs don’t work. Tried reloading multiple times.

GH pages cache can be very annoying sometimes.

Or maybe it is just not obvious that the background waves are a visualization. I just was reading this thread after going to the website and thought "I didn't see any visualization either". Then went back to the website and noticed the background.

Also, the title is "Document" -- not much good for bookmarks :-)

Fixed — thx and hugs!

I just tried to bookmark it, now the title is "Home".

Looks great though, can't wait to try it.

This is awesome! More amazing still is that my Macbook 16" isn't even going into VTOL/Artic emergency space heater mode when playing with the demos!

These sort of graphs always manage to surprise me with these hidden patterns that the brain thinks it recognises but never seems to be able to pinpoint.

Wish I knew what to do with a library like this in a personal project. Sadly, mathematics isn't exactly my biggest strength...

If anyone has any cool graphs or visualisations with hidden patterns or meaning to share I'd love to see them. And to stay on topic and to not hijack the thread: bonus points if they were (re)created using OP's lib :)

I've been trying to come up with a side project that would use it, make sense, and not involve just randomly sticking more features in there for around 5 years now =) Actually I open sourced it exactly for someone else to take a shot at it as well.

Best open source project origin story ever. Hah!

On a more serious note though, I can really see this taking off. Easy to use API, well written and easy to follow docs, good performance.

And if this ever does take off, there'll ben no end of awesome works people will create based on your foundation.

Thanks for sharing and creating, I have not been able to find easy no-boilerplate 3d plotting in the browser for a while. grafar seems to fit this niche well.

Looks neat but browsing the site on mobile is infuriatingly difficult. Tapping the tutorial link under Next Steps does nothing and it's hard to scroll around with the plots so large / left side of screen taken over by navigation.

Next steps links should be fixed now. The problem with conflicting scroll / orbit on mobile needs more thinking, thanks for the feedback.

This looks great. Just a heads up, the vsolve section of the tutorial has comments in Russian(?). Otherwise, looks very clean and useful.

It does indeed have comments in Russian, thanks! Actually, the entire source has comments in Russian, too — I may need to sort it out someday.

Maybe it's just me but I think a library focused at visualizing data in 3d space should use orthographic projection as a default. Coll stuff nevertheless.

I did use axonometry in the early versions. While it did work well for surfaces with faces, lines and particles floating in 3D space were extremely confusing because you couldn't tell what's closer. Supporting different projections (and generally exposing the lower-level renderer details like controls) is a great idea, and should be a quick fix — I've made an issue https://github.com/thoughtspile/grafar/issues/7

Great work, I might use this in some of my apps. Beautiful and lightweight, keep it up!

EDIT: Also, the link on your Github repo is broken.

Not as lightweight as I'd like it to be (threejs is pretty big), but in some respects it probably is.

Thanks for the heads up, I was too eager to get it out of the door — all the links should be OK now.

This is great! And the examples work on the phone just without any issues! Congratulations

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