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

Published: 0 month ago (April 6, 2026 at 02:53 PM EDT)

2 min read

Source: Hacker News

Prezi

Pioneered the zooming canvas for presentations and remains the market leader in that space.
Recently added AI‑powered generation and text‑editing tools.
Polished product with real traction.

Closed platform, not a library—you can’t embed its zoom engine in your own app.
Pricing starts at $15/month for meaningful features.
Exporting to PowerPoint flattens all zoom effects into static slides.
Users often report motion‑sickness from the zooming and panning transitions.
Uses zoom as a storytelling device between pre‑arranged frames, not as a navigation model.

Brought Prezi‑like zooming to the open web as a presentation framework built on CSS3 transforms and transitions.
Architecture is step‑based: you position “steps” in 3D space and the camera moves between them.

Great for presentations but not suited for apps where users navigate by zooming into content.
No concept of dynamically mounting views, managing zoom depth, or handling navigation state.
Essentially a slide‑deck engine with a zoom trick.

Full disclosure: I’m the sole developer.

Offers 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 the new view.
Started in 2020 after the author’s work on Zircle UI (a Vue zooming library).
Framework‑agnostic and focused solely on the zoom part.
Views are dynamically mounted and unmounted during zoom transitions.
- In impress.js, all steps exist in the DOM simultaneously.
- In Zumly, the target view is injected and scaled into place when you zoom into a trigger element, which is closer to SPA routing than to slide‑deck behavior.
The landing page is built with Zumly itself, so you can experience it before touching any code.