Hi! I'm a computational scientist by training, and I've spent an unreasonable number of years wrangling gnuplot and matplotlib to make figures look right for papers and presentations. At some point I just wanted to try to build a tool to help.
Gridpaper is a figure editor that runs entirely in your browser. Under the hood, it's gnuplot 6 compiled to WebAssembly, which means you get all that rendering power without installing anything. No account, no server, your data never leaves your machine.
The core idea is that there are no chart types. Instead you compose layers from a small set of building blocks: 12 geometric marks (curves, bars, heatmaps, vectors, surfaces…) across 5 coordinate systems. A scatter plot with a fit line isn't a special widget — it's two layers. A grouped bar chart is three bar layers in a group set to dodge. It sounds abstract, but in practice it means you can build a lot from very few pieces.
Some things worth poking at:
* The example gallery has 50 figures you can click to open in the editor
* Try importing a CSV (drag it onto the canvas)
* Switch to polar or 3D coordinates and watch the available marks change
* The design page¹ explains the compositional grammar if that sort of thing interests you
I should be upfront: it's not open source yet. I'm a solo developer and I want to get the core solid first. The plan is to open the rendering engine (the gnuplot WASM bridge and compiler) first, then the full editor.
Claude is very good and I believe they have enough to take them to profitability. Just over the last week or so, I’ve spent ~$30 beyond their monthly plan fee and I love it.
But is this good enough to justify a $350B valuation? Netflix gets that sort of valuation with hundreds of millions of subscribers and well established delivery costs.
I even set up an account. But the confirmation link in the email is broken
It makes me think the projects arent organic but placeholders, because how are people posting projects without accounts? I would love if the account creation process was fixed so people could post interesting side projects i could browse through
ah! darn it! i think my partner right now just tried to make the "confirmation email" feature so thats fresh of the press and probably doesnt work yet. sorry!
You cant post project without account, so the ones that are there were made before we now tried to fix the email confirmation stuff. we are on it!
Id give them a pass. Non professional development is already hard as is
If the problem we have with modern professionally developed software is that its become soulless and treats its users like resources to exploit rather than partners to work with, in exchange for dangling polish and convenience in front of their faces, then the alternative is this: hobby devs who sometimes mess up and rely on community feedback
To be fair, having worked on this stuff, it can be difficult to test features like email confirmation separately from prod. (Obviously in a big commercial environment you have all the infrastructure for that, but you don't necessarily have that here.)
Dont know, didnt talk to him when he was doing that. We're just two guys trying to make something cool that can change the world! But yeah, on the road to that we should test as well
Gridpaper is a figure editor that runs entirely in your browser. Under the hood, it's gnuplot 6 compiled to WebAssembly, which means you get all that rendering power without installing anything. No account, no server, your data never leaves your machine.
The core idea is that there are no chart types. Instead you compose layers from a small set of building blocks: 12 geometric marks (curves, bars, heatmaps, vectors, surfaces…) across 5 coordinate systems. A scatter plot with a fit line isn't a special widget — it's two layers. A grouped bar chart is three bar layers in a group set to dodge. It sounds abstract, but in practice it means you can build a lot from very few pieces.
Some things worth poking at:
* The example gallery has 50 figures you can click to open in the editor
* Try importing a CSV (drag it onto the canvas)
* Switch to polar or 3D coordinates and watch the available marks change
* The design page¹ explains the compositional grammar if that sort of thing interests you
I should be upfront: it's not open source yet. I'm a solo developer and I want to get the core solid first. The plan is to open the rendering engine (the gnuplot WASM bridge and compiler) first, then the full editor.
Happy to answer questions about any of it!
¹ gridpaper.org/design
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