Torrey Pines R&D
A whiteboard where every box opens.
Torrey Pines R&D is a one-person software studio in San Diego. It builds Subcanvas, an open-source tool for whiteboards and documents that nest inside each other.
Product
Subcanvas
A whiteboard where every box opens. Draw the big picture, then open any box or any arrow and find a whole whiteboard or a page of notes inside it.
Subcanvas is a whiteboard and document tool where documents nest inside each other. A node on an architecture diagram opens that service's own diagram; an edge between two services opens a text document describing the protocol between them. Nesting goes as deep as the idea does.
A box can hold a page of notes, which opens in a side panel so the drawing stays where it is, or another whiteboard, which opens as a sheet of its own. The same page can be linked from many places — it stays one page, not five copies, and shows everywhere it is used.
People invited to a project edit together live, with cursors. People who only need to read can watch for free. Public projects are readable by anyone with the link and carry a way to report abuse.
For developers, a public GitHub repository can be imported as a system diagram: one box per folder, each folder's README inside its box. An optional .subcanvas file names what a folder talks to, and each connection becomes an arrow with its description behind it. A public diagram embeds in a README as a picture that stays current.
What it does
- Nested whiteboards and text documents, to any depth
- Live collaborative editing with cursors and presence
- Free, unlimited viewers on any project
- Public projects readable by link, with abuse reporting
- GitHub repository import into a system diagram
- Embeddable diagrams that follow edits
Plan
- Price
- Free — no paid plan yet
- Card required
- No
- Projects
- Public and private alike
- Editors and viewers
- As many as you like
- Media storage
- 1 GB per organisation
- Licence
- AGPL-3.0, self-hostable
Subcanvas is free while it is this new, and takes no card. A paid plan comes later; nothing is charged until it does.
Business
- Legal name
- Kibeck Trevin Lee
- Trading as
- Torrey Pines R&D
- Structure
- Sole proprietorship
- Location
- San Diego, California