The Digital Atrium
A collaborative infinite canvas. Collect images, video, sound, PDFs, slide
decks, spreadsheets, links and notes, arrange them in space rather than in a
list, draw and connect them, and let other people walk through what you built,
live, with their cursors beside yours.
Where an atrium lives
The person who makes an atrium decides where it's kept, and the same app reads
all four:
| |
|---|
| On your computer | The desktop app keeps atriums in a local vault (SQLite and plain files). They never touch a server. |
| In your browser | The same vault in the browser's private storage. No account needed. |
| In your Google Drive | Encrypted before it leaves the browser, shared by link. Google holds only sealed files; the key is in the link. |
| Online | Hosted on the site's own storage, for atriums that should stay up without anyone's computer on. |
People in the same atrium see each other's cursors and laser over direct,
encrypted connections between their browsers (WebRTC), and each other's saves
the moment they're made.
Built with
One React and TypeScript codebase for both platforms. The canvas is PixiJS
under a DOM layer for the traces. The desktop shell is Tauri, in Rust. The
site is on Cloudflare: Pages for the app, and a Worker (workers/rooms) with
D1, R2 and Durable Objects for accounts, hosted atriums, live rooms and mail.
Supabase was the original backend. Almost everything has moved off it.
The source is public. It is not open source.
This repository is readable so that anybody can see what the app does with
their data. No licence to use, copy, modify or redistribute it is granted.
See LICENSE, which is the only statement about this that counts.
It said MIT for a long time, in a badge, in a footer and in package.json.
That was left over from a different program that occupied this repository
before the Atrium did. It was never true of this code.
Layout
| |
|---|
src/ | The React app, shared by both platforms |
src/lib/supabase.ts | Exports isDesktop; swaps in the local data client where an atrium is local |
src/lib/localDb.ts | The vault: SQLite behind the same .from() shape as the online client |
src-tauri/ | The desktop shell, in Rust |
workers/rooms/ | The Cloudflare Worker: accounts, hosted atriums, live rooms, contributions, mail |
supabase/ | The original backend's functions and migrations, being retired |
extension/ | The browser extension that sends a page to an atrium |
tests/ | Unit tests (npm test) |
scripts/ | Release, asset and code-history tooling |
docs/ | The help articles, and notes on the domain and on being found |
CLAUDE.md holds the working notes that matter before changing anything:
what the desktop vault does not implement, how migrations are applied, and
how a desktop release is published.
Building
npm install
npm run dev # web, on :5173
npm run tauri:dev # desktop
npm test # unit tests
Verify with npx tsc --noEmit -p tsconfig.json, then npm run build. Use
npm run tauri:build for the desktop bundle.
The site deploys from the main branch. Publishing a desktop update is its
own process, with a signing key that cannot be regenerated. It is written down
in RELEASING.md and should be read before the first release,
not during it.
Reporting something
Bug reports and suggestions are welcome, as issues or through the feedback
panel in the app. Pull requests are not being accepted: the licence above means
there is no arrangement under which a contribution could be merged.
