I was playing around with this, but I was thinking "this is dumb - I can barely draw any sort of lengthy line at all."
Then I switched from the gaming mouse my sister bought for my birthday to my trackpad, and I could suddenly draw really long lines.
My hypothesis is that my gaming mouse has really high precision, so it was sending tons of mousemove events (or whatever) to Chrome. JS was using the aggregate number of such events, rather than the aggregate distance between them, as a cutoff. Therefore, people with really precise input devices can barely draw a line at all, while people without such devices can use the app just fine.
Also, if you move the mouse faster, you can get longer lines. It’s a very bad and stupid measurement, and I’m surprised Google would actually choose this.
sorry! this is a bug based on how many events the mouse is firing and I've open an issue for it -- I will take a look at the app with a gaming mouse and work on a fix.
My utterly ordinary "Microsoft Optical Mouse V2.0" draws lines about 1"/100 pixels long when moving at normal speeds. I've been trying to draw Michigan, but utterly unable to get a thumb on the lump.
The spec sheet [1] describes a resolution of 3000 FPS/800 DPI.
I'll take a look - thanks! note that we do limit the line somewhat since the best matches are curves, lines, etc and self intersecting lines don't match very well.. The best kinds of lines are like the ones in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6-LK9BOVTA)
Then I switched from the gaming mouse my sister bought for my birthday to my trackpad, and I could suddenly draw really long lines.
My hypothesis is that my gaming mouse has really high precision, so it was sending tons of mousemove events (or whatever) to Chrome. JS was using the aggregate number of such events, rather than the aggregate distance between them, as a cutoff. Therefore, people with really precise input devices can barely draw a line at all, while people without such devices can use the app just fine.