A focused push to make the flow canvas feel instant, even with hundreds of flows
and thousands of nodes on screen at once. The goal: panning, zooming, and
browsing should stay buttery smooth on a mid-range laptop — not just a top-end
machine.
What got better
- Grabbing and dragging the canvas now responds instantly, with no stutter or
lurch on the first movement.
- Removed a hitch that happened the moment you started a drag, so the canvas
tracks your cursor from the very first pixel.
- Inertia (the gentle glide after you let go) now only kicks in when you’re
actually flicking the canvas. If your cursor was resting still before you
released, the canvas stops cleanly instead of drifting unexpectedly.
The canvas stays smooth with lots of content
- The canvas can now handle 1,000+ nodes on screen — a dozen large flows at
once — without slowing to a slideshow.
- Only the flows currently in view are drawn; flows scrolled off-screen no
longer cost anything. As you pan, new flows appear right at the edge of the
viewport with a quick, subtle fade-in.
- Removed heavy visual effects (background blur and per-node texture/noise) that
looked nice but quietly tanked performance whenever the canvas moved.
The minimap keeps up in real time
- The minimap’s “you are here” viewport box now updates live as you pan, instead
of lagging behind or jumping only after you stop.
Browsing flows is snappier
- Opening the browse view no longer auto-zooms way out to fit everything — which
used to make the canvas look broken and tiny before you’d even touched it. You
now start at a sensible zoom.
- Flow cards and their mini tree previews are far cheaper to render, so scrolling
through many flows stays fluid.
- Hover effects on selectors were tuned to render more efficiently without
changing how they look.