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Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

I'm building a complicated canvas app[1] for visualizing Bitcoin markets. I resorted to building my own framework on top of canvas, exactly for performance reasons. It's fast, but as a framework I was never too happy with it because it's a little half-baked.

More recently I found and fell in love with React for other frontend work, and use it exclusively now for any view-related work. I might have to go back and rewrite the ugliest parts of my code with this, it looks awesome. Kudos to Flipboard for open-sourcing it.

[1] https://cryptowat.ch

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Very cool app. I'm going to pass it around to friends who are more into cryptocurrencies than me. :)

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I have a question: you seem to have been successful in stopping left/right swipe from navigating back and forward. The app I'm working on supports horizontal scrolling, but it can be a bit confusing if you mean to scroll and accidentally navigate.

I've tried a few things and looked around for answers, but so far the solutions I've found haven't worked out. Can I ask what your secret is? :)

    document.querySelector('canvas').addEventListener('mousewheel', function (e) {
      e.preventDefault();
    });

If it really is this simple, I'm going to kick myself repeatedly. Thanks. :)

Looks awesome! Two quick questions:

1) Your site looks very similar to bitcoinwisdom ( which i love). Did that come about by coincidence or design? Are there any open source tools that you were able to build off of that bitcoinwisdom also uses?

2) Could you build out support for visualizing financial markets like stocks and the price of oil? The bitcoin ecosystem has a bunch of great UI, but it's difficult to find good web products for actual securities

Thanks. I definitely looked at Wisdom when I was starting the project, but I've gone in different directions than they have. For example, a strong emphasis of my service is the ability to integrate your accounts on various Bitcoin exchanges and visualize your orders and trades (http://i.imgur.com/KxxtGFA.gifv). I'm actually slowly turning it into a proper trading platform, with order execution. On the other hand, BitcoinWisdom are still happy just serving charts with ads.

I'm not sure what they use to build their app. No part of mine is open source except tiny bits of d3, and jQuery.

Wrt supporting other types of markets, I'd love to. The reason Bitcoin has had a wave of nice web-based interfaces is because the exchanges all offer free-to-use HTTP APIs. The "old-world" financial markets all charge money for data access, and it's generally not as easy to consume either. Bitcoin markets were born into the web era.

I did the same a while back, which paired Backbone with Easel / Create.js for both interface and game elements. It worked ~ok~, but was never quite what I wanted and a lot of cleanup was still required in order to achieve solid performance.

Looks awesome! Can you share any architecture info? The frontend is built on d3+reactjs+jquery, how about the backend?

Go and Redis

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