Infinite canvases with Steve Ruiz // Metamuse podcast episode 59

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 kind of made use for content, educational content, when I worked at a company called Framer. So that was all very involved as well, very produced, and it took a lot of time to make. And I didn't want to do that any more. So the kind of, the place where I settled in terms of the kind of content that I would use to drive interest around TLDraw, bef... See more

And this also brings us to the why now and and why is this hard if this is the fully generalized form of digital documents, why didn't software start this way? I think a big part of it is just that it's hard. We talked about how it's hard to write a text editor, but what if you now need to write a text editor and image editor, a video editor and au... See more

This brings me to a problem that we've been noodling on for several years, and to my mind, it still a critical open question. So when you're trying to build these end-user extensible, digital document systems, there's a few desiderata that you want: You want to be very fast. You want to be safe, in the sense of, end users aren't going to be injecti... See more

The issue there is that all these tools pretty much anything that wants to use that kind of canvas UI. It's a tough engineering problem. And there's like a ton of the functionality of like a canvas like that that is — it's almost like a text editor that it just has to be there in order for it to feel complete. And if it's not complete, it'll feel b... See more

This idea a kind of like this bet, that we're living in a moment where, for better for worse, there's a lot more remote collaboration. People want to do interaction or collaboration through software more and more that needs to happen somewhere. The canvas is probably the place where that's going to happen. My bet was these apps, there's just going ... See more

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

The joy of using a kind of web based canvas, of rendering stuff using the web, although that sounds like such a bad idea to render things in HTML and CSS, but it really does give you the ability to just put anything that can be in a browser on the canvas and interact with it.

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

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.