Although like many I probably would prefer a traditional cursor, I appreciate that people are exploring the possibilities of the space. I hate change for its own sake. But there are so many choices that go into graphical user interface design. Even if we've hit a local maxima, I don't think we've hit on the best paradigm. We've only been at this for ~60 years or so. Not to mention the personal preference that goes into this. Keep exploring! Keep experimenting! (Just please don't force me to change how I use my computer against my will.)
I know these consent warnings are generally considered an annoyance, as well as dangerous due to consent fatigue. Not to mention the little hacks I've seen POCs of where clicking the consent button allows for lots of nasty things since it works around the browser's autoloading javascript restriction since the user has to interact with the page.
But I personally love these warnings and consent messages. I wish there were more of them! I wish there was a consent message before any kind of cross-origin action was allowed. Can you imagine how many there would be on any sites that use ad networks?
The performance on my phone makes me sad. PixiJS can barely hit 30 fps and the others do worse than that. FWIW, I have a Pixel 2 phone and I'm using Firefox.
Don't worry, the benchmark is not optimized and only testing a very specific thing, you can still do awesome complex stuff running at 60fps with any of these libraries :)
I love this, but it suffers from an issue I've observed in my own attempts to make mouse-based drawing tools in the browser with JavaScript. If you move your mouse too quickly, the low polling rate of events becomes evident because rather than showing a smooth curve, you see straight lines that are drawn between the two points that were captured for each event.
This is my white whale.
I don't currently have the math chops to fix this in my own implementations, but there are others who have succeeded where I have failed. For example, the web client/controller thingy for the game Drawful 2 by Jackbox has addressed this. Since you can't increase the polling rate in the browser and you can't arbitrarily read the mouse position during things like requestAnimationFrame, you're forced to interpolate the movement of the mouse given the past few events. They're using curves in Drawful 2 instead of straight bitmap-style canvas drawing like in the first Drawful.
But beware, this has a downside. It's very easy to incorrectly interpolate the movement and exaggerate the curve, making it curvier than the actual movement of the mouse.
I guess the web browser just wasn't designed with precision input capture in mind. But that doesn't mean we can't still aim for improvement. For a game like Drawful, more options are probably overkill. (They don't allow you to erase by design.) But for an art tool like this, it might be worth adding an option for input smoothing along with knobs to tweak to adjust the smoothing amount. Or not. I certainly can't fault you for not implementing such a feature given that I can't seem to get it to work.
I did a little research into this. This website [1] mentions something I'd never heard of before. That some browsers "collapse" real mouse events into fewer "fake" events that tie the event poll rate to your monitor's refresh rate. Even though I'm using Firefox and not Chrome like they mention, I'm seeing that exact phenomenon. The highest number of mouse events I can seem to generate is 60 per second.
However, this other website [2] is showing me events on the order of up to 124 Hz. Either that site is doing something special or it's lying. The JavaScript there is decently obfuscated. I'm going to spend a few minutes trying to deobfuscate it and see what I can find out.
I think I sussed out the secret sauce from that Benq website. They're using the experimental getCoalescedEvents [1] function to uncollapse the mouse events!
