One of my favorite and most often used functions of all time is “remap”. That is not a standard name, it’s just what I call it. Remap is a more general version of the well known "lerp", which if you haven’t heard of it before, comes from smooshing the words “linear" & "interpolate” together, and remap can be built using lerp and its inverse, "unlerp".
I was putting clickable name tags into Limnu the other day – they show up when multiple people are drawing, and someone draws somewhere you can’t see. A name tag appears on the border of your screen, and you can click it to zoom over to their view.
One of the most requested features for Limnu is the ability to put an image on a board and then draw on the image. Well, it's high time, and we're busy making it happen.
But yesterday we hit an interesting snag. See, we are trying to keep Limnu as simple as it can possibly be - ideally as simple as a real, physical whiteboard. We have regular debates over how to do things in the simplest way possible. We always end up with a good plan that everyone agrees on. But it's not always easy to get there, because the truth is that the digital world is more complicated than a whiteboard, and we're searching for the balance between adding cool features and making things easy to use.
I've been lucky enough to work with some amazing artists. I've also worked with people who have a hard time drawing a stick figure. But when you're brainstorming and problem solving with a team (which is what Limnu is designed for), it turns out that you don't have to be an accomplished sketch artist. You just have to be willing to pick up a marker and draw in front of someone else.
One of the very talented artists I worked with is a guy named James Buckhouse. He recently wrote an article called "If you can draw these three shapes, you can draw the Internet", where he demonstrates that with a circle, a triangle, and a rectangle you've got the building blocks to communicate almost any idea in your head... three shapes is, more or less, all you ever need.
If you’ve ever spent any time trying to draw something that looks good on a computer, you realize pretty quickly that using a mouse isn't fun. It's been described as “painting with a bar of soap”. It’s very hard, if not impossible, to draw well that way.
And don’t even get me started on drawing with a laptop trackpad. Painful.
