benshumaker0

We've thought about this. Site has an "early startup" vibe (because it is an early startup). It's hard to know exactly how to reach the next level. Maybe just building more content? We're definitely not just dabbling with the idea or pulling the plug.

We made a playground for HN if you want to try it without an account. It's linked in the post. https://app.repaint.com/playground

We're not sure. WebGPU seemed too early to us. But as I got deeper into WebGL, the ability to do more arbitrary computation sounded more and more appealing. I wouldn't be surprised if migrated down the road.

Whoa, that's brilliant. I think that just works for out app. Is there a public reference I could look at?

We weren't planning on it. It's not very clean or transferrable. We really hacked it together. We'd have to do a ton of work to make it useful for anyone.

Thanks! Yeah, text rendering nearly killed me. And all I did was latin script. I even punted on ligatures for now. I'm insanely impressed by the people who made full text support.

And maybe it sounds silly, but we don't personally feel pure love for technology. We're obsessed with a vision. And we've decided to conquer any technical challenge to make it real.

We already do lots of rendering to cached images. It's not a panacea. It saves you from unnecessary recomputing. But many actions update the rendered state per-frame. Zooming is a great example. You can't cache it at every resolution.

Maybe there's a way and we didn't find it? We looked at every example we could find. There's a lot of canvas apps without WebGL. But they're all orders of magnitude behind the Figma benchmark. Everything not using WebGL felt noticeably less smooth.

And in our user testing, our texting editing is already past the valley :)

Fixed. Thanks for the note!

There's a playground in the post if you want to try it without making an account :)

Thanks for the notes! I'll look into spline.

I've never of a web app that lets you pull panels to a second screen. Sounds neat though. Is there a good reference?

Code export wasn't our original plan, but we've been thinking about it more and more. It seems like Repaint is only a couple steps away from a pretty sweet "design tool for real code".

You're right about the exporting though. We're not sure exactly how to synchronize a code editor & Repaint editor for two way updates.

Yeah, I really want to improve the AA. The built-in AA only supports 4 samples. In testing, it didn't seem to do much. My research suggested most apps like this handle it at the shader level, and we just haven't gotten to perfecting them all.

We use msdf textures. Generate them dynamically when people upload fonts. We tried 3 methods, and we're sticking with msdf for now because its very fast.

Man you're right. The text layout system was brutal. I had a particularly memorable day where I couldn't figure out why our line height didn't match the browser (and each browser was different). I fixed it by adding a constant that was buried in the font files. It took 12 hours. It was a one liner.

Haven't planned accessibility help yet. But I think simple warnings could go far. When I break guidelines, it's usually by accident.

I went to a non-ivy school and dropped out. There's always hope :)

Should be fixed. Thanks for the note!

Fixed. Thanks for catching this!

Thanks!

We think our ux foundation is stronger. Many high-frequency actions are faster: moving between pages, copying content between them, multi-select editing. Especially if you're used to Figma. A lot of designers feel like Webflow is notoriously cumbersome to use.

But we also want to keep it very close to html/css. We think it's the only way too push power really far. Webflow did that. Framer's diverged quite a bit. We imagine it might go beyond a website builder to be a generally good "design tool for code"