Could those ubiquitous hand-drawn code diagrams become a thing of the past? (NOTE: Also appears in ACM Queue 8:7, Aug 2010.)

The user interfaces of today’s development environments have a “bento box” design that partitions information into separate areas. This design makes it difficult to stay oriented in the open documents and to synthesize information shown in different areas. Code Canvas takes a new approach by providing an infinite zoomable surface for software develop-ment. A canvas both houses editable forms of all of a project’s documents and allows multiple layers of visualization over those documents. By uniting the content of a project and in-formation about it onto a single surface, Code Canvas is de-signed to leverage spatial memory to keep developers orient-ed and to make it easy to synthesize information.

Code Canvas is an experimental research platform for building a spatial development environment. It lets us explore design alternatives when dealing with source code on an infinitely scalable two-dimensional surface.