Code canvas: zooming towards better development environments

The user interfaces of today's development environments have a "bento box" design that partitions information into separate areas. This design makes it difficult to stay oriented in the open documents and to synthesize information shown in different areas. Code Canvas takes a new approach by providing an infinite zoomable surface for software development. A canvas both houses editable forms of all of a project's documents and allows multiple layers of visualization over those documents. By uniting the content of a project and information about it onto a single surface, Code Canvas is designed to leverage spatial memory to keep developers oriented and to make it easy to synthesize information.