Sam Sacks, I respect your opinion, but maybe I could inspire a bit of reconsideration.

This line of reasoning is also presented by users who don't see the value in todos/task actions, graphs, AI, queries, collaboration, publishing, API/integrations, calendar, etc. In almost all these cases, there's a degree of unwillingness to ignore what is optionally there and a failure to recognize how others could benefit from these features. Additionally, there's a pattern of using other apps as examples of poorly implemented features to justify dismissing a feature altogether. Capacities would be extremely barebones if all the "bloat," as many would call some of its features, were nonexistent. Moreover, the common request of "just use X other app" is what most people are trying to avoid, splitting up their knowledge base, work, and subscriptions among many options.

Austin Hou I just don’t think there’s much inconvenience to reaching back into the toolbox once in a while.

There are already so many ways to link Objects together and reference information, which you can even visualize with graphs.

I don’t think a whiteboard feature could be safely mentioned in the same sentence as Pages, Tables, Tags, etc. Those are very simple, flexible tools with big payoffs that don’t individually require a lot of development resources. A whiteboard feature would be the exact opposite: a lot of development resources for a comparatively smaller payoff.

Maybe a more practical alternative could be graphs that are more interactive.

I completely understand your reasoning. As the original requester of this feature, I want to clarify that the intention isn't to make Capacities similar to Heptabase, Scrintal, or other existing tools.

What I'm envisioning is a spatial layout option for notes, similar to a whiteboard where you can visually arrange your content. Think of it like organizing papers on a desk - you can group related notes in different corners. This would be implemented as an additional visualization option alongside the existing list, wall, and table views, rather than as a new object type. While it shares some similarities with a graph view, this would be more static and user-defined.

I believe many users could benefit from this spatial organization approach when sorting and structuring their spaces. The key, as you've previously mentioned, is to integrate this feature seamlessly into the app without disrupting the experience for users who prefer the current visualization options.

I hope my reply makes sense.

David Jaggi So glad you chimed in to clarify. I like this idea a lot.

It would be really useful to have it as a view option because then it actually saves you the trouble of having to manually create an object and do all the linking. AND the button takes up virtually 0 real estate on the screen, just tucked neatly away until you need it… great idea

Sam Sacks thanks for the thoughtful response. Reading the replies, I think there was a difference in expectations of what this feature means for all of us.

I simply want a space to be able to drag/drop/position cards of various objects around (particularly images with resizing). What David suggests would work for me, if resizing and creating collections of a limited set of object entities is an option. The linking is secondary, though it could be nice to enable mind maps and other more complex diagrams for technical work (basic UML, maybe?). Not my priority though, that will stay in Lucid for now.

As for development, this purely depends on what they are willing to do in terms of using off the shelf libraries or not. I was able to build a modern node editor similar to Unreal Engine’s editor with a linput and output drag and dropping between nodes in a few days as a side project for hooking up various APIs. There’s a lot more overhead in extending an exiting project but this doesn’t scream nearly like as big of a lift like going offline first, even with a custom canvas implementation.

Attached is how I want to use this feature (although neater…) for a board to clip art/design reference and quick insight notes. I don’t really care much about writing using some sort of pen in it, but that could open up handwritten notes and diagrams for a lot of people—which is a paradigm shift in how much Capacities can do. Chemical and electrical diagrams would actually be possible. I had to resort to Obsidian for creating them before using Latex + some libraries. None of this is required for the user to use (like Heptabase) and I’d want this to stay optional as well.

I think having Canvas as an object property is the best approach. Those that want it can add it, otherwise; it’s completely hidden. A dedicated Canvas type could be created for embeds into any other object entity. Having a global canvas view per object type is limited and honestly going to be too limited for what many would want. Handling filters and collections for them would be, imo, a comparable development lift vs creating a Canvas object property, though this depends on the existing codebase’s structure.

Michael McNaught so important !

Michael McNaught this is super important to me. Until Capacities offers this, will stick with Heptabase although would love to use Capacities

Steffen Bleher it's essential to me in the long run, and I agree it's the one thing I so miss about Obsidian. I've always been a mindmapper, possibly because I'm aphantasic and can't visualise, so I have to offload those visualisations elsewhere. I use a couple different mindmap apps between Mac and PC, but Obsidian's canvas always led to really good insight about my notes and how they interrelate, much more so than the graph view. It enabled me to not just read my notes, but really work with them. As a PhD student and education professional, it's the meat of the job.