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Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

244 points by kbyatnal

by lionkor

4 subcomments

The performance is quite bad. There are some basics missing or broken.
- no caching for file previews
- no sorting by date in the file picker
- no sorting by size in the file picker
- no sorting by file type in the file picker
- no search in the file picker
- cant enter a folder in the detail view (only expand) in the file picker
- cant go to page (by page number) in the document viewer
- after clicking a button in the document viewer, focus is lost on the document and arrow keys, space, pgup/pgdown dont work until the document is clicked again
- cant select text in the document viewer, unless I search first, in which case it then works
This is after looking at the file picker and document viewer less than 3 minutes(!!!). I gave up after that. Getting 80% of a file picker is easy, getting the last 20% done, so that it's on par with existing software, is not.
Very very odd to have things look this polished, yet be this terrible functionality- and performance-wise. These are not random quirky new ideas I'm having, these have been basics that work in every single file picker and document viewer since the early days of UI, before the web.

by pea

1 subcomments

Looks cool but your home page heavily lags on my mbp m3 pro - you should maybe be lazy loading vs loading all your components upfront

by dvt

1 subcomments

Super cool. Working on a local AI tool specifically for document workflow automation (where context = screen/web/folders/files), and this could come in super useful. I do most of the PDF/DOCX/etc. parsing natively in Rust, but having a nice way to see the output without spinning up Word or Powerpoint is a huge leap.
Thanks for releasing publicly.

by CraigJPerry

1 subcomments

Those bounding box demos are decent.
By quirk of fate i've spent the past 2 days prototyping some stuff on pdfjs. Just trying to figure out a game plan for handling bounding boxes in the face of page zooming, different resolutions etc. etc. I can't see it mentioned whether the components are virtualising pages (as in reusing dom elements as document pages scroll by). I guess i just learned what i'll be exploring tomorrow then...

by sails

1 subcomments

Experienced the same nightmare a few times over with citations.
React/next is limiting, we have rebuilt this for angular and now redid it again using lit for better compatibility. Our old one is very similar to this.
Loading citations for each field across 1000s of pages, colliding citations for all the messy formats, zoom, rotate etc. what a mess!
Great that you took the time to MIT this as it would have saved us many hours, though I think today Fable + Codex makes it pretty quick
I could recreate these in lit as a fork, would be very useful to have the full set

by egeozcan

2 subcomments

Why doesn't it mention anywhere that they are React components?

by iamsaitam

1 subcomments

The performance on the site is truly terrible, the top animation was probably going at 5fps when scrolling.

by qreoct

1 subcomments

Cool project! I was playing around with the Excel viewer - the docs claim "Search across sheets and cell ranges", but I can't seem to trigger search functionality and the browser search bar can't find contents on cells.
Is this a known issue?

by mklifelife

1 subcomments

Looks great.
I'm curious whether the primary users are AI-native document products or more traditional SaaS applications.
The document-app niche feels increasingly important with the rise of AI workflows.

by whitephoenix

1 subcomments

It looks really great! But, from what I can see, it’ll need some work on optimisation. Good luck with this project, guys!

by spankalee

2 subcomments

These should really be web components. Leaving out every framework other than React is really bad for the web.

by codingconstable

0 subcomment

its nice, people are harsh, you did something useful, thank you.

by rolls-reus

2 subcomments

Mind sharing a link to the source code? i couldn’t find it on the website.

by warthog

1 subcomments

really like these - curious how the xlsx editor and viewer is built in that what kind of headless spreadsheet?
could not have been easy

by hobofan

1 subcomments

Thanks, that looks awesome! We were looking to add DOCX and XLSX preview to our app, and were planning to do server-side conversion to PDF (which seems to be what most other apps resort to) due to the lack of good libraries to render it, and this is exactly what we were looking for! :)

by promiseofbeans

1 subcomments

How is your PDF coverage? They are notoriously difficult things to render, with endless edge cases. Mozilla’s PSD.js is the status quo here, so what do you do better than them?

by phonon

1 subcomments

How does it compare to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48436863 ?

by plastic041

1 subcomments

Looks clean and works fine, but it needs optimization. Clicking "Type" in the "schema builder" example takes 1~2 seconds to open the popover in the landing page(macbook pro m4). I think its because there are lots of heavy components, but still it's too slow.

by stinger

1 subcomments

Does it/will it support Markdown files?

by Lord_Zero

0 subcomment

Document Splits drag and drop looks weird, like it doesn't drag from where I clicked.

by cactusplant7374

0 subcomment

This is really interesting. Thanks for creating this.

by carlosjobim

1 subcomments

Excellent that you offer Miller columns, one of the best tools for computing and information browsing, and management. The world should run on Miller columns.

by KolmogorovComp

1 subcomments

> This page could not load
On mobile Safari…

by deafpolygon

0 subcomment

“React components”.. I stopped there.

by dzonga

0 subcomment

so slow like molasses

by greenleafone7

0 subcomment

Another AI built project. Which OK, but then at least have a look at it to fix/optimize things.

by wu1064442747

0 subcomment

good

by topaitools_xyz

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by daohieu91

0 subcomment

[dead]

by bschmidt800

0 subcomment

[dead]

by peteforde

0 subcomment

I was excited by the headline but then when I got to the page
1. I saw it was React
2. Nothing loading, just a page full of spinners
I truly wish React could be launched into the sun.