Infinite canvases with Steve Ruiz // Metamuse podcast episode 59

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

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

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

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

I've also called these multi-media canvases because I think there are two dimensions going on. So one is the canvas-ness, which is at least two, sometimes three dimensions, and the freedom and flexibility to place content items wherever you want — like you were saying, with relative independence. The second axis is multimedia. So which types of med... 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.

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

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

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

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.