[pilgrim0]

I would use it for organizing dossiers on a research topic. For collecting thoughts and references for things under my current scope of work. I would use it temporarily and not as a primary storage/organization system. A short term memory aid if you will. In this context the number of canvases I would be creating/destroying would be high. The distinct killer feature for me is just being able to layout multimedia files neatly in the canvas. The neatly part is very important to me, meaning I care deeply about media taking a discrete amount of grid cells and filling them up perfectly. I’m used to CAD and design tools where you have complete control of metrics, alignment and spacing. I wouldn’t care for arrows and labels, this ends up just being yak shaving, hard to maintain and superfluous. Your approach is what I think is an ideal desktop environment. Traditional desktops are worthless because they only have icons and do not layout files like a literal desk top. These canvases have very little value as a document for me in the sense of a permanent storage thing. Since there’s no guarantee I’ll have the app in all my devices at all times. I haven’t investigated how you do it, but in the uncommon case I needed to persist the canvas long term, if it generated a single sidecar text file describing the canvas (like obsidian and excalidraw does) then I could depend on this file and commit it alongside my repos. But I would expect the ability to have multiple of these sidecar files for the same directory tree, hence able to have multiple ways of analyzing the same set of media, reflecting different perspectives and stages of analysis. IME software that require zero commitment for using it are the best. Like text files. It feel like a tool and not a platform. So the idea of always creating a project and things like that is pure cognitive overhead to me. Even apps that are fully local and require no account do feel like a platform when they require some kind of upfront establishments prior to giving access to some or all functionality.