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Tech News
Google Sheets now allows users to publish Canvas creations—AI-generated dashboards, calendars, and task boards built with Gemini—as standalone shareable links. Viewers can interact with the published Canvas without ever gaining access to the underlying spreadsheet. Publishers can set separate viewing permissions and decide whether the shared version updates live with spreadsheet changes or stays frozen.
Luther Tychonievich, who built eight custom board-work applications for teaching since 2014, has published a technical post explaining how to draw variable-width Bézier curves using existing 2D graphics APIs. He notes these applications were created because he found no suitable commercial tablet tools for live classroom drawing, and built versions in both JavaScript and D using various rendering backends including SVG, Canvas, Cairo and GSK.
A developer built Tasfer, a text editor that bypasses the browser's contentEditable API and instead renders every character, cursor, selection and line break itself on an HTML5 canvas. A hidden input field still captures keystrokes so native typing, autocorrect and Arabic or Chinese input methods continue to work, but the browser no longer controls how anything appears on screen. The creator says an earlier attempt used WebGL and WebGPU to render text like a game engine before settling on 2D canvas as sufficient and faster to ship.
Figma is developing an in-house editing agent trained via supervised fine-tuning to understand its native file format and make iterative design changes, such as spacing, color, or layout edits, directly on the canvas. The company built training data by pairing starting designs with synthetic edit requests and validated outputs, using larger teacher models, deterministic validators, and visual judges to check results. Figma reports that an early Llama 3.3 70B model trained with this approach performed well on these tasks.
An independent developer has published phoria2, a lightweight JavaScript library for building 3D charts, labelled scenes, dashboards and product viewers using WebGL 2. It is a rewrite of the author's earlier canvas-based phoria library, aiming for a simple API that can be learned quickly, and was shared on Show HN.
A technical comparison contrasts how Obsidian Canvas and Heptabase handle spatial note-taking. Obsidian Canvas saves layouts as JSON-based .canvas files that embed existing markdown notes, while Heptabase treats cards as central, reusable entities that can appear across multiple whiteboards simultaneously. The analysis notes that a connecting line in Obsidian only records visual position, whereas in Heptabase it creates a relationship the linked cards retain and can surface elsewhere.
Google engineers Thomas Nattestad and Natalia Markoborodova announced an experimental HTML-in-Canvas API, now available via origin trial, that lets developers draw DOM content directly into a 2D canvas or a WebGL/WebGPU texture. The API aims to keep that embedded UI interactable and accessible while retaining browser features such as text selection, translate, dark mode and autofill.
Samsung's 2026 Frame Pro (55-inch) has dropped $100 to its lowest price yet, around $1,098, down from its $1,498 retail price in August. The standard 2026 Frame is also discounted to $898, matching the price of last year's model and marking its cheapest price so far.
At his DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote, Drupal creator Dries Buytaert said the platform has outpaced its public reputation and announced a new advocacy program to showcase recent progress. He detailed updates including multilingual support for the Drupal Canvas page builder, React-based code components for JavaScript developers, and continued improvements to Drupal Core and Drupal CMS, which combines Site Templates, Recipes, Drupal AI and Canvas.
A developer has rebuilt an old prototype vehicle simulation as a browser-based JavaScript project, layering a 'Brick', a 'Ship' inspired by the 1986 game Thrust, and a 'Car' on top of a shared 2D rigid-body physics core. The system uses true rigid-body dynamics with torque rather than the simplified point-physics hacks common in older games, paired with an approximate, self-described 'not physically accurate' tyre model for vehicle handling.
A developer launched a free, self-paced Python course on Hacker News aimed at absolute beginners. Learners progress through exercises like drawing a robot, repeating a pattern, and responding to a mouse click, using a visual canvas to teach core concepts such as function calls, values, variables, and loops.
Shopify unveiled Canvas, a new tool that lets merchants build and customize their online stores by chatting with its AI agent Sidekick instead of manually editing themes or code. The tool renders real store code in real time, letting merchants preview full interactivity, animations, and responsive layouts as changes are made. Merchants can still click and edit elements directly, but the primary interface is conversational.