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Specifications

Version 1.0 Documentation

Crystal Canvas is not just a rendering upgrade—it is a complete mechanical, visual, and architectural overhaul of the native Obsidian Canvas. Designed to bypass traditional canvas lag, it turns your vault's canvas into a living, breathing workspace for fluid spatial thinking.

Rendering Core

1. The Living Environment

Reactive "Lake-Surface" Background

A fully customizable, elegantly animated backdrop. It responds to your node placements like the surface of a lake, utilizing advanced masking to make your nodes visually pop without sacrificing an ounce of performance. It takes the stiffness out of the workspace, making it feel alive. You can fully customize patterns, colors, and spacing to match your exact aesthetic.

Inertia Panning

Pure, physics-based navigation. When you pan across the screen and let go, the canvas carries your momentum naturally. It eliminates the jarring "dead stop" of the native workspace, making navigation feel incredibly frictionless.

Precision Anchor Zoom

The zoom mechanics have been completely rebuilt from the ground up. The zoom center is now perfectly anchored to your cursor with smooth, mathematical easing. It feels like you are seamlessly diving into your ideas rather than just clunkily scaling a webpage.

Glassmorphism Grouping

Grouped nodes automatically adopt a stunning, blurred glass effect. The color and blur dynamics adjust based on the nesting level, and the colors react beautifully to the movement of your mouse cursor, adding a deeply premium feel to your organization.

Ether Transitions

Switching between canvas tabs triggers a soft, beautiful viewport blur. It completely eliminates harsh visual cuts, keeping the experience incredibly easy on the eyes during long sessions.

Extreme Customization

Every single visual feature mentioned here includes 20 to 30 dedicated sub-settings. You have the total freedom to tweak the dynamics, colors, and physics exactly to your liking.

Vector Layer

3. The Pro Drawing Studio

Smart Shapes & Auto-Morph

Draw a jagged circle, a crooked triangle, or an awkward polygon. The moment you release your cursor, the engine instantly morphs it into a perfect geometric shape. It gracefully auto-closes unlinked ends, taking the friction out of quick sketching.

Advanced Brush Engine

Features 4 distinct brush styles with a precise preview stroke that matches your actual output size. Apply beautiful effects like shadows, glows, and advanced blend modes, and pin your strokes directly to the canvas or the viewport.

Custom Palettes & Fills

Manage your colors in the dedicated Palette Library panel. Create custom brush presets and fill your shapes with solid colors, soft blurs, or diverse pattern fills.

The Animation Studio

Bring your sketches to life. Apply 2D and 3D animation presets to your strokes, or record your own custom stroke movements and let them run on a continuous loop.

Selection & Ordering

Advanced Lasso multi-select tools give you precise Z-index rearrangement for overlapping strokes.

Unrivaled Export Engine

Export your selections as PNG, JPG, or SVG in multiple sizes and backgrounds. For the power users, you can even export flat 2D strokes as fully rotatable 3D .glb files.

Interoperability

Export the entire drawing layer as proprietary Crystal JSON (retaining all your advanced effects), standard tldraw, or Obsidian tldraw. You can seamlessly import existing whiteboards straight into your workflow.

Spatial Logic

4. Node Mechanics & Neural Routing

Infinite Connection Points

We bypassed Obsidian's rigid single-center-point limitation. You can now add multiple distinct connection edges to any single side of a node, allowing for incredibly complex, organic mapping.

Smart Neural Re-routing

If you drag a connected node across the canvas, the connection intelligently detaches and re-attaches to the most logical side. No more ugly, overlapping lines—just clean, readable thought paths.

Connection Customization

Fully customize the shape, labels, animations, and color of your connections. Flip directions instantly, and navigate the canvas effortlessly just by following the connection paths.

Nested Corner System

Dynamic border-radius adjustments based on high-end UI rules. When nodes are nested inside other nodes or groups, their corner roundness automatically scales to look mathematically perfect and visually pleasing.

Absolute Node Rotation

Break the grid. Free-rotate any text, image, or media node in 2D space to build the exact visual hierarchy you want.

Workflow Macros

6. Automation: The Template Sidebar

Canvas Stamps

Select any arrangement of nodes, groups, and media, and save the entire cluster as a perfectly reusable template.

Chain Templates

Pre-program a sequence of templates for rapid deployment. Stamp Template 1, click again to stamp Template 2, then Template 3—allowing you to lay out complex frameworks in seconds.

Smart Placement

Pre-select your UI colors for groups before you even place them. Paste templates individually or deploy them in massive, structured grid stamps to build out your workspace instantly.

Audio/Video & Text

7. Pro Media Player & Pretext Engine

Custom Media Nodes

A bespoke, beautifully integrated media player for audio and video files. Features live audio visualizers, loop, shuffle, and auto-start controls right on the canvas.

Timestamp Deep-Linking

Capture a screenshot directly from a playing video node. The screenshot drops onto the canvas tagged with an exact timestamp. Clicking that screenshot later will automatically snap the source video right back to that exact frame.

Pretext Engine (Beta)

An advanced markdown and text-card rendering engine operating under the hood to ensure your text scales, displays, and reads flawlessly at any zoom level.

Future Core

8. The Horizon: What's Next

Crystal Canvas v1.0 is just the foundation. The architecture is built, the engine is humming, and we have a massive roadmap of ideas and features coming in future updates. The goal is to continuously push the boundaries of what a frictionless, infinite canvas can feel like inside your vault. This is a living project, and it is only going to get more powerful, more fluid, and more beautifully tailored to how you think.