Programming Social Applications

The Canvas View (Large View)

The canvas, or large, view is considered the fully featured view for your application. Most containers do not impose restrictions on the use of JavaScript or Flash within this view, and it offers the greatest amount of functionality for providing content and tools to end users. This view is the meat of your application, providing the bulk of the functionality and features that the application is capable of.

Unlike the small view of an application, the canvas view is not displayed with other applications in the same view; rather, it generally encompasses the majority of the social container view, delivering a high pixel count for the available height and width, as shown in Figure 1-7. What this means for developers is that when users interact with this view, they have already engaged with the application by either visiting it directly or by being interested enough in one of the small views to follow a call to action to see the larger view. In the vast majority of cases, if a user comes to this view, he is already invested in your application.

Figure 1-7. The application canvas view

The most important thing to remember here is that this view is the best interaction the user will have with your application. Overcomplicating his experience, abusing his social information (e.g., pushing too many messages to his activity stream), or failing to provide a means by ...