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Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different | Hacker News Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different 24 points by tinchox6 1 hour ago | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments There are essentially two established ways to use zooming in web interfaces today. They serve different purposes and make different tradeoffs. I built a third one, so I'll try to be fair about what each does well and where it falls short. * Prezi Prezi pioneered the zooming canvas for presentations and remains the market leader in that space. It recently added AI-powered generation and text editing tools. It's a polished product with real traction. But Prezi is a closed platform, not a library. You can't use its zoom engine in your own app. Pricing starts at $15/month for meaningful features, and exporting to PowerPoint flattens all zoom effects into static slides. A recurring complaint from users is that the zooming and panning transitions cause motion sickness. And fundamentally, Prezi uses zoom as a storytelling device between pre-arranged frames. It's not a navigation model. It's a presentation model. * impress.js impress.js brought Prezi-like zooming to the open web. It's a presentation framework based on CSS3 transforms and transitions, directly inspired by Prezi. It was genuinely groundbreaking when it launched. Its architecture is step-based: you position "steps" in 3D space and the camera moves between them. That's great for presentations, but it doesn't help you build an app where users navigate by zooming into content. impress.js has no concept of dynamically mounting views, managing zoom depth, or handling navigation state. It's a slide deck engine with a zoom trick. * Zumly This is what I built. Full disclosure: I'm the sole developer. The idea is offering an alternative to traditional page navigation using zooming. You mark an element as zoomable, point it to a view, and Zumly handles the transition and inserts new views. That's basically it. I started Zumly in 2020 after leaving behind Zircle UI (a Vue zooming library), trying to take what I learned further. Framework-agnostic, focused just on the zoom part. Since then I've rewritten the engine several times, changed the approach more than once. Only now I'm actually happy with how it feels. Views are dynamically mounted and unmounted during zoom transitions. In impress.js, all steps exist in the DOM simultaneously. In Zumly, you zoom into a trigger element, and the target view gets injected and scaled into place. This is closer to how routing works in SPAs than to how slide decks work. The landing page is built with Zumly itself so you can get the feel before touching any code. Curious if anyone else has thought about this space. What makes zooming UIs work or fail? Landing page (built with Zumly): https://zumerlab.github.io/zumly GitHub: https://github.com/zumerlab/zumly   help solarkraft 0 minutes ago | next [–] I have great respect for people pursuing their special interests with such perseverance - you clearly care about zooming UIs. And so do I (just to a lesser extent)! It’s a great way to express hierarchy. One thing I encountered is that it becomes all buggy after using the slide-back navigation gesture in iOS Safari. Yet this being natively handles would be a really cool thing to me, like those iOS “close back to thumbnail” gestures you sometimes see when scrolling up/down that I haven’t really seen replicated anywhere else. reply sijmen 11 minutes ago | prev | next [–] Interesting way to use zooming as a way to transition deeper into sub-dashboards. The navigation from "Mission Control" -> "Satellite" -> "Subsystem" feels oddly intuitive and fun. I would maybe opt for keeping a consistent navbar/sidebar, to support out-of-zoom navigation. And if we are dealing with a lot of power-users some breadcrumb to quickly go back to any zoom-level. But overall, i think this could totally work. reply tosti 25 minutes ago | prev | next [–] This looks seriously impressive. Also, I wonder what the a11y implications are. I don't miss Macromedia Flash hell at all. This is HTML5, so with a bit of effort it could look beautiful and still cater to the visually impaired. Edit: I can't scroll any of the showcases. Probably deliberate, but a cut-off UI can be annoying. Edit2: I opened the yellow car on the production line and going back the page got all offscreen and looks messed up reply tracker1 8 minutes ago | prev | next [–] Would suggest using history-api navigation over the hash based routing. reply drob518 21 minutes ago | prev | next [–] Interesting. At one point I pinched my iPad to zoom out of habit and it got very confused. But yea, interesting. reply cynicalsecurity 5 minutes ago | prev [–] Doesn't work correctly in Firefox. Feels sluggish, but maybe this could be fixed by reducing the transition time. But why? People usually don't notice such transition effects and it doesn't affect user experience in any meaningful positive way. It feels absolutely unnecessary. Maybe you could re-use it as a mod for some game engine. This feels appropriate for video games; not for web-sites. reply Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact Search: