Indeed it's hard to drag things around in 3d which is why we restrict movement of parts to the XZ plane effectively making it a 2d editor in a 3d viewer.
Yeah. 3D view navigation is generally tricky with mouse/keyboard. The way it is setup here is good. The problems come in when there are also interactive elements in the view and this leads to a lot of usability issues. The mouse click/drag operation is overloaded and no feedback is provided to disambiguate different modes.
A few quick issues that I encounter with this (in trying to build a basic waveform generator):
* At a slant angle view a lot of components are blocked and cannot be clicked, one must change the view in order to target them.
* There is no feedback provided to disambiguate between when the mouse will engage in camera/view navigation vs component translation.
* No feedback is given in the hover state to let the user know when component they are targeting. (I frequently moved the whole breadboard by mistake).
* Component placement is very hard. The holes are small and all look the same. Offering some feedback about which holes would be connected would be much easier to use.
* Connections are hard to ascertain. Sometimes this requires a change of views, but also the bread board get cluttered. Offering some visual affordance for the connections could help make this superior to a physical equivalent and also remove the requirement for tacit knowledge (most people don't know how the rows/columns of a breadboard are connected.
* Wires get tangled. They currently take a linear path (in XY) between the two connections. Some research has shown that using curved paths is easier for the eye to follow (so something like a smooth step). Alternative offering some ability for the user to push/pull them apart or edit a bezier path might help her).
* Components have no flexibility. One must use wires to get the correct circuit topology which complicates things visually/ interactively.
Again I want to be clear that I think that this technology is really interesting and it has a lot of promise - especially since it is a pure web stack. I also think that it is not yet at the stage where it can arrogantly mock its rivals for using 15 year old UI component libraries.
