Infinite Canvas - Whiteboarding App
The Context
Infinite Canvas is my latest venture into creative tools, launching in 2025. It’s a whiteboarding and sketching app with infinite zoom and pan capabilities, available across Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
This project represents my return to graphics and creative tools, combining my experience in app architecture with a fresh take on digital canvas applications. I love low-key visual storytelling in presentations, and I’m a visual thinker overall, doodling and sketching a lot to think. So this app was meant to fill my small niche.
Technical Challenges
Infinite Zoom Implementation
- Custom rendering pipeline for smooth zooming at any scale so that I could really expand on ideas
- Exploring data-structures to partition infinite space
- Level-of-detail system to maintain performance
Cross-Platform SwiftUI
- Unified codebase for Mac, iPhone, and iPad
- Platform-specific optimizations while sharing core logic
- Touch, mouse, and trackpad input handling
Immutable Data Architecture
- Pure functional approach to canvas state
- Efficient diffing for real-time collaboration potential
- Predictable undo/redo through state snapshots
Team Dynamics
While a solo project, Infinite Canvas benefits from:
- Early beta testers from my existing app communities
- Collaboration with designers for UI/UX decisions
- Feedback from digital artists and note-takers
Personal Reflections
It’s exciting to work on something visual after years of text-based apps. The immediate, tactile feedback of drawing reconnects me with the graphics work I did in my youth, the presentation slides I miss making – and the glee my baby daughter showed when she could test the app was priceless.
Infinite Canvas brings together everything I’ve learned about app development to perform, not learn, and release something new in a short time-frame. I resurrected an old prototype and used the mid-2025 LLM tech for agentic coding to iterate and prototype much more rapidly than I could code. This LLM-augmented coding experience over the course of a couple of weeks strengthened my resolve for documentation and clear, technical writing. It helped the LLM not go too far off rails, and as a result I had much better documentation that I actually wanted to interact with.
The take-away: If you explain a concept to a junior developer who is just joining your team, everyone wins.
Impact
The app represents my continued commitment to creating focused, powerful tools that respect users’ creativity and workflow: a visual thinking tool in my toolbox for independent scholars.