Infinite canvases with Steve Ruiz // Metamuse podcast episode 59

One element you touched on there Steve, which also, I think, fits in with the multimedia side as well, as you talked about the elements. You know, we call them cards in Muse just because I think that works for us visually, and particularly with the touch screen. It feels like an index card moving around on a desk or something. […] There might be sl... See more

One of the opportunities of having like a multimedia canvas is the ability to extend it semantically, almost. You see some of this discourse around, like the idea of Notion like block based editors, right? It’s that text is the primitive, images are primitive. But you start to kind of wrap these things up into more specific, domain specific, or pro... See more

I feel like for these complex problems, it's basically impossible to design a framework de novo. And people try this all the time, but it very rarely works. Instead, what happens is you have an application that works well, and then basically you copy and paste that two or three times, and then you look at the diffs, and the things that aren't the d... See more

Because it is like we're not writing a renderer — we're not writing a systems level like WebGL renderer. Instead, the browser is our render, and so we need to have as much knowledge about how that thing works as we would if we were working with a lower level architecture.

Someday there's going to be a product, or two products, that are competing with each other, with similar features, and the thing that they're not going to be competing over is like how well the eraser works or how well the select tool works. They are going to be competing at that higher level — of the features that they built that are unique to the... See more

Especially on the web, we are used to a a kind of a document metaphor that, the web is just built for, which is a kind of a vertically scrolling infinite page. Infinite canvases are essentially like a different document format. This idea of that there are two dimensions, or almost three. You know, you can move left, you can move right, you can move... See more

The name infinite canvas, whether that's a category or component. And it's one that I have some mixed feelings about. Because, on one hand, Mark uses the term multimedia canvas. More commonly, we called Muse a spatial canvas, in kind of 1.0 positioning. And I also like the term open canvas — we actually do use that a bit on our web site, talking ab... See more

I think related to this idea of constrictive mediatypes and layouts is the notion of premeditated workflows verses totally in the control of the user workflows. So typically with software, you have workflows that are designed by a product manager, and they write that into the software, and that's that. So you can imagine, for world building, you ha... See more

But it wasn't long after that that the Ace editor, I believe it was, was kind of the first, really solid, open source, in the browser code editor. And that seemed to unlock a kind of explosion of people seeing that. I know Github used it in the early days for some of their stuff, but lots of other projects as well. Suddenly people saw, oh, there's ... See more