A Flexible Inter-App Communications Experiment

This project is a way for me to experiment with a client-server architecture with cross-platform apps as the clients and Azure hosting the server. I'm developing a discussion platform featuring an quasi-infinitely zoomable drawing space in which app users can communicate with each other by drawing, writing text and adding images anywhere in the canvas at any scale. Updates are communicated with other subscribers to that canvas in real time. OK, so it's not original. But I think there's a chance that once I've got the framework in place I can try to take it to some relatively unfilled niche. Or, if not, at least learn something.

MAUI DEV STORIES

Stephen Moreton-Howell

10/14/20262 min read

The General Idea

My aims are these:

  • Learn and practice the basics of developing .NET MAUI based apps that exchange data between each other via a server.

  • Use those principles to develop a general purpose communications app in which users can:

    • Create a blank infinitely zoom-able canvas.

    • Add and edit line drawings, blocks of text, images and video to any part of that canvas at any scale.

    • Zoom in and out and scroll.

    • Invite other users, or groups of users, or the whole world, to see and/or contribute to that canvas.

    • If more than one user has edit permissions to a given canvas, label those objects (lines, text, images, etc) with the name of the user who created them.

Yes, I know, I know.
I knew that already and after I'd got started, using Claude as my AI assistant, I described my ultimate intentions and asked him/her/it/them how original it is. He/she/it/they obviously pointed out that it's not remotely original. There are loads of products like that already on the market, including at least one SDK that can be used to make further products like that. But I don't care because, for one thing, it's a learning exercise (see first bullet point above) and for another thing I think once you've got something like this up and running you never know where you could take it and you might suddenly find a little unfilled niche that you couldn't see from a distance.

But that's not an original idea. It's already been done by ...

So the vision is of a forum where people can exchange ideas in as freeform a way as possible. Like a communal canvas on which a group of people can quickly and easily paint their shared ideas.

Look at WhatsApp, for example. When it first started, many people said "Who needs that? We've already got SMS". But it quickly became clear that it was much more useful than SMS.

So I'll give it a go and see where, if anywhere, it takes me.