Whiteboard / Canvas / Drawing
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David Jaggi
The ability to connect multiple entities on a whiteboard and add free text. The whiteboard itself is also an entity and has it's own database. A good implementation is Heptabase.
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Steffen Bleher
Thanks for voting on this ticket.
We just released an updated "What's next" article. You can read it here: https://capacities.io/roadmap/whats-next
We currently don't have whiteboards on our roadmap. Nevertheless, we do not exclude that this can change. We still encourage you to vote on this ticket to get a better idea of the importance to users and to stay updated on the topic.
Beth
Merged in a post:
Whiteborad
Y
YI SUI
please Whiteborad！！！
Beth
Merged in a post:
Add a whiteboard or excalidraw plug in
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Dave Williams
M
Major Bubble
I also vote for a canvas. It needn't be a complex thingy like Excalidraw, just a straight and simple canvas which visually let us plot relations of objects.
In my opinion, while Capacities has lots(!) of strengths, the lack of visualization features is its weakest aspect.
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Warren Collins
Agreed - for many there is no substitute for sketching out the problem and the positions of it's relative components
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Warren Collins
Agreed - for many there is no substitute for sketching out the problem and the positions of it's relative components
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Eduardo Sebastián Castro Quispe
Many notetakers eventually face the need to write a diagram in a lecture, in an easy and fast manner. Therefore, I would appreciate the inclusion of a feature that allows the user to draw useful diagrams for their notes.
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Neo 😎
Yes white board and mind maps are important to have
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Paul Parrella
Al menos una vez al mes, desde que abrí la cuenta de Capacities visitito la herramienta con la esperanza de encontrar la aplicación del lienzo. Es lo único que me retiene en obsidian. Más allá de tomar notas en obsidian, he integrado la herramienta a mi dinámica diaria como docente. Uso el lienzo para impartir mis clases, es mucho más útil que un PDF que no pueda editar. En obsidian, tanta libertad de ajuste me obliga a replantear la estrutura de trabajo de manera permanente. Luego de varios videos en youtube y en la academia de esta web, estoy entendiendo la razón de los objetos en Capacities y considero la idea de asumir la herramienta como mi gestor del conocimiento, sin embargo, este paso no será posible hasta que pueda crear lienzos en Capacities. Me niego a tener mis pizarras contenidas en otro lugar, eso es el inicio de un nuevo desorden... espero que esta petición tan votada por tantos (929 votos) sea reconsiderada como una prioridad de integración a Capacities. Me gustaría estar aquí de manera permanente y no solo de visita.
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Paul Parrella
Tambien me gustaría que la páginas, ofrezcan la opción de presentación como pasa en obsidian.
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Sam Sacks
The reason I left my other apps and came to Capacities is bloat. This seems bloaty to me.
Edit: I actually like David’s idea. Read the comments
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Austin Hou
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.
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Sam Sacks
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.
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David Jaggi
Sam Sacks
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.
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Sam Sacks
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
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Austin Hou
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.
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Austin Hou
This is sorely needed for creative work. Having Milanote, Affine, Obsidian, or Heptabase canvas features would be extremely useful as a bulletin board for art references. As it stands, I cannot use Capacities for any creative work. The deprioritization of this feature is potentially an oversight since the Capacities team seems highly technically minded. Perhaps the importance of this feature isn't as clear?
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