schizoboard

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  The board in action

schizoboard

This is the first and only online evidence board (that we know of)! The app brings all of the core functionality of a physical evidence board straight to the web, where you can upload custom images, documents, and text.

We were inspired by an It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode where Charlie uses one of these boards to solve a conspiracy. We thought it'd be fun to replicate those schizophrenic clue-solving evidence walls for anyone's online crime-solving needs.

This project was a huge undertaking as we decided to use SvelteKit to develop our website, which extends functionality from basic website programming languages by combining HTML, JS, and CSS into one "easy-to-use" development environment. However, one of us had no experience with SvelteKit and very little web programming experience in general, so it was a struggle to learn in such a quick amount of time. Our website also doesn't conform to what a standard website might look like, which made it tough to find resources online for our programming challenges, math help, and other unique features.

We learned quite a bit about some strange topics, such as faking an infinite canvas by zooming and scrolling the background, and connecting arbitrary points with our textured yarn line. Along with these visual elements, we also discovered a bunch of techniques to be used under the hood. Our document support required integration with an external library, and the system used to store objects on the canvas is very complex.

In the end we got everything we wanted done, but this project was a huge learning curve for the both of us. We spent way more time than we should have getting every little element to work properly. But looking back, our skills and experience have significantly increased after completion, and schizoboard is a complete project we are both proud of.

Built With

• sveltekit
• typescript