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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

This is so satisfying. These types of experiments are something I really love about the open-web, and part of what bums me out about how most social networks tend to throttle links.

The dragging behavior is so intuitive – it's funny because usually if you create this kind of resistance in a UI it can be confusing, but in this context it works so well.

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> this kind of resistance in a UI it can be confusing

it's actually intuitive because it mimics a real life physical dragging of an object by a rope, which most people have a feel for. Skeuomorphism can be quite intuitive imho.

Try drawing your signature with it and see how intuitive it feels.

Lazy radius: 9

Friction: 0.04

Brush radius: 13

-> clear

-> draw your signature

You’ve basically turned down the smoothing features

You've basically described the post above.

That'd be an amazing phishing attempt...

It’s not a tool for signatures. It’s also hard to sign documents with a paint roller.

But this UI is much better at, e.g. drawing a smooth, symmetrical heart symbol, with a crisp turn.

Different UI for different tasks, and it’s very cool to see something that intuitively lets you control something that is normally hidden under your finger.

Skeuomorphs retain purely ornamental components of the thing it’s mimicking. If it was a graphic of a rope rather than a dashed line, or if it looked like the line was tied up around the thing in a bow, those would be skeuomorphic elements. But graphical interface elements always retain ‘some’ functional connection to the physical world and trigger ‘some’ abstracted existing metal model about how the world works. GUIs themselves conceptually mimic the idea of a physical space because it’s easier for people to reason about than a bunch of text. This is no more skeuomorphic than the reply button below the comment box.

This a very nice web implementation of a feature that exists since probably forever in most graphics software.

I don't think I've ever seen this feature ever before (keeping in mind that the purpose of the tool is to draw smooth lines, and there would probably be another tool for drawing signatures). It's quite brilliant!

Lazy Nezumi has been around since 2009. Stabilisers,etc. are a lot more prominent in the digital art community.

Yes! That's it! :-)

Photoshop has had it for quite a while now. It's titled brush smoothing

Does it have the leading drag handle? That's the brilliant part. My ancient copy of Photoshop has a smoothed brush; but it doesn't have the leading drag handle.

Kind of. You can click a gear and set various options on it, including a "pulled string mode", which works similarly to this, where it has a "smoothing radius" that movement within will not change cursor direction, and then a "stroke catch up" mode where the stroke is at a somewhat constant speed, regardless of how you move your mouse.

The former looks like this https://i.imgur.com/TGE7N1z.png

I dunno why people are praising this, because it makes it impossible to do natural scribbles. It's picking the algorithm over the result.

Perfect freehand is the right way to solve this.

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