Hacker News: pbsurf

New comment by pbsurf in "Nicu's test website made with SVG (2007)"

pbsurf — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 16:32:01 +0000

Another SVG website: https://styluslabs.com/

New comment by pbsurf in "OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps"

pbsurf — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 06:17:04 +0000

No business, just me!

New comment by pbsurf in "OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps"

pbsurf — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 06:14:10 +0000

Yes, you can download any region and set of layers for offline use.

New comment by pbsurf in "OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps"

pbsurf — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 22:46:27 +0000

I've been building https://github.com/styluslabs/maps with support for 3D terrain, custom layers, and plugins for search and routing.

Vector tiles are generated and served on-demand by https://github.com/styluslabs/geodesk-tiles so there's no need to download an entire country or region first.

New comment by pbsurf in "OpenPlanetData – Free Daily Planet OSM PBF and GOL Indexed Snapshots"

pbsurf — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 15:41:33 +0000

This is great! I recently built a simple project to generate and serve vector tiles on demand from a GOL file: https://github.com/styluslabs/geodesk-tiles

New comment by pbsurf in "A community-led fork of Organic Maps"

pbsurf — Mon, 12 May 2025 16:19:10 +0000

I'm working on https://github.com/styluslabs/maps/ including a new 3D map engine (based on Tangram-ES) and JS plugin support, so while there is no offline routing yet, support for additional online routing services can be added by users.

New comment by pbsurf in "Serving Vector Tiles, Fast"

pbsurf — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 06:07:19 +0000

I've built a server for generating OpenStreetMap vector tiles on demand from a GeoDesk database, which is barely larger than an .osm.pbf (100GB vs. 80GB for current planet.osm.pbf) - much smaller than a PostGIS instance: https://github.com/styluslabs/geodesk-tiles

New comment by pbsurf in "Show HN: 3D Terrain simulation for hiking, skiing etc."

pbsurf — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 17:06:14 +0000

I'm working on https://github.com/styluslabs/maps - has Sentinel-2 imagery, slope angle shading and custom slope shading including slope aspect.

New comment by pbsurf in "Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?"

pbsurf — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 01:00:06 +0000

https://github.com/styluslabs/maps - open-source maps app

New comment by pbsurf in "Using Qt for Mobile in 2023"

pbsurf — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 02:25:47 +0000

I believe QML ListView actually does support kinetic scrolling - Qt calls it "flicking". To get behavior closer to React Native, it might work to decrease the value of the Flickable flickDeceleration property [1].

That said, my troubles with Qt's performance and behavior on mobile led me to create my own cross-platform GUI library: https://github.com/styluslabs/ugui/

[1] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qml-qtquick-flickable.html

New comment by pbsurf in "BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout"

pbsurf — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 18:09:56 +0000

Juries, perhaps?

New comment by pbsurf in "Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook replacement"

pbsurf — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 20:28:27 +0000

Excellent until the charging ports burn out, requiring a motherboard replacement: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/X1-Ca...

New comment by pbsurf in "Vector graphics on GPU"

pbsurf — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 20:39:15 +0000

GPU vector graphics library I released a few years ago: https://github.com/styluslabs/nanovgXC - basically a new backend for nanovg that supports arbitrary paths. Coverage calculation (for analytic antialiasing) is explained a bit here: https://github.com/styluslabs/nanovgXC/blob/master/src/nanov...

New comment by pbsurf in "Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs"

pbsurf — Sat, 16 Jul 2022 06:43:41 +0000

Getting sufficient antialiasing quality for 2D graphics is difficult on GPUs. https://github.com/memononen/nanovg accomplishes this with GL2/GLES2 level hardware for most of the stuff one would want to render as part of a GUI. My project https://github.com/styluslabs/nanovgXC supports rendering arbitrary paths with exact coverage antialiasing, but requires GLES3.1 or GL4 level hardware for reasonable performance.

New comment by pbsurf in "Bicycle Recommendations"

pbsurf — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 08:41:20 +0000

Regarding aluminum vs. steel - I've had two aluminum frames crack after a couple years of normal riding (no crashes). Trek, to their credit, honored their warranty and replaced the bikes. Given enough time, aluminum will always fail; steel will not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_limit

New comment by pbsurf in "Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?"

pbsurf — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 20:54:01 +0000

I'm working on computational chemistry, with the very long-term (decades) goal of designing molecules (proteins/enzymes) for things like artificial photosynthesis and molecular computing (chips still rely on the bulk properties of semiconductors; for miniaturization to continue, at some point it will become necessary to design molecules to function as logic and interconnect).

See https://github.com/pbsurf/chem

New comment by pbsurf in "Witeboard"

pbsurf — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 05:52:36 +0000

Take at look at https://github.com/styluslabs/stylusboard - no web client but native apps for all major platforms

New comment by pbsurf in "Ask HN: How to do cross platform GUI?"

pbsurf — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 13:25:47 +0000

For my cross-platform app, I was originally using Qt for desktop platforms and Android. I was fairly happy with Qt on the desktop, but less so on Android, in part because I was using Qt Widgets - Qt Quick is the newer, preferred way to build GUIs in Qt, at least for mobile. Around 2016 I started looking into an iOS port - at the time, Qt for iOS was fairly immature and there was (is?) some uncertainty about licensing requirements for statically linking Qt on iOS. Having already spent more time than I wanted fighting various problems with Qt on Android, I decided to consider alternatives and ended up creating my own SVG-based GUI library that I now use across desktop and mobile:

https://github.com/styluslabs/ugui

New comment by pbsurf in "PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later"

pbsurf — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 14:29:40 +0000

One way that SVG could be used for multipage documents is with a convention that the top-level

But another barrier is that browsers refuse to support SVG fonts. One supposed reason for this, the lack of hinting support in SVG fonts, is less relevant now with high DPI displays - macOS no longer does hinting at all I believe. The additional effort to support SVG fonts is really minimal [2], so it seems strange that it's intentionally omitted.

[1] https://github.com/styluslabs/ulib/blob/master/miniz_gzip.h

[2] https://github.com/styluslabs/usvg

New comment by pbsurf in "Fast 2D Rendering on GPU"

pbsurf — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 05:24:18 +0000

I've just released a fork of nanovg that does GPU rendering a bit like Pathfinder, so it can support arbitrary paths - nanovg's antialiasing has some issues with thin filled paths. It also adds support for dashed lines.

https://github.com/styluslabs/nanovgXC

If you give it a try, let me know how it works for you.