Visual Canvas & Team Workspaces

Launch edition: this release note describes a feature in UpdateTinus's early-access preview; details may change before general availability.

Release notes are a team sport. The engineer knows what changed, the designer knows why it looks the way it does, the product manager knows which customer problem it solves, and someone on support knows exactly which question users will ask first. Until now, most teams stitched those perspectives together in a chat thread, a doc, and a last-minute copy-paste into whatever tool publishes the changelog. With v2.5.0 of the UpdateTinus preview, we are bringing everyone onto the same page, literally, with the Visual Canvas and Team Workspaces.

A canvas instead of a text box

The Visual Canvas replaces the single editor field with a flexible drafting surface. Each release note is made of blocks: headings, paragraphs, callouts, before-and-after comparisons, media galleries and small "what this means for you" cards. You can drag blocks around, collapse the ones you are not working on, and preview how the finished note will look on your public changelog and inside the in-app beacon widget at the same time.

We designed the canvas around a simple idea: the best release notes are shaped, not just typed. Seeing the whole story laid out makes it easier to notice when the most important change is buried in paragraph four, or when a screenshot would explain something faster than three sentences.

Multi-author cursors

Invite teammates into a draft and you will see their cursors move in real time, each labelled with a name and a color. Two people can edit different blocks at once without overwriting each other, and if you both reach for the same paragraph, the canvas shows who is typing so you can coordinate rather than collide. Inline comments let reviewers suggest wording without touching the text itself, and suggestions can be accepted with a single click.

• Presence indicators show who is viewing or editing a draft right now.
• Block-level locking keeps a section stable while someone finishes it.
• Version history lets you step back to any earlier draft if an edit goes sideways.

Team Workspaces

As products grow, so do the number of people who want to announce things. Team Workspaces give each group its own home for drafts, templates and publishing settings, while still feeding a single, consistent changelog. A mobile team and a web team, for example, can each keep their own drafts and review rules, then publish into a shared timeline with clear labels.

Each workspace can define:

1. Default templates and tone guidelines for new release notes.
2. Who can draft, who can review and who can press publish.
3. Which channels a published note flows to, such as the public changelog, the in-app beacon or a private roadmap update.

Roles are intentionally simple during early access. We would rather start with a small, understandable permission model and expand it based on feedback than ship a maze of toggles nobody remembers configuring.

Scheduled announcements

Shipping and announcing rarely happen at exactly the same moment. Sometimes the code is ready on Tuesday but the blog post, the docs and the support macros are planned for Thursday morning. Scheduled announcements let you finish a release note whenever it is ready and set it to publish at a specific date and time, in the time zone that makes sense for your audience.

Scheduled notes appear on a small calendar view inside each workspace, so it is easy to spot two big announcements landing on the same afternoon and spread them out. You can reschedule or pull a note back to draft at any point before it goes live.

Our goal is that announcing a release feels like a moment of celebration, not a scramble. Scheduling is one small way to give that moment some breathing room.

Media galleries

A good screenshot can do a lot of explaining. The new gallery block lets you drop in multiple images, animated GIFs or short clips and arrange them as a carousel or a grid. Each item supports a caption and alt text, and the canvas gently reminds you when alt text is missing so your announcements stay accessible to everyone.

Galleries render responsively on the public changelog and in a compact, swipeable form inside the beacon widget, so users on small screens get the same visual story without endless scrolling.

Tips for great galleries

• Lead with the "after" state, then show the "before" if the contrast matters.
• Crop tightly around the change so readers know where to look.
• Keep clips short; a few seconds of motion is usually enough to show a new interaction.

How emoji reactions fit in

Notes written on the canvas still support emoji reactions once they are published. Reactions are a lightweight way for users to say "this is great" or "I am confused" without writing a full comment. In the preview, reaction totals show up beside each draft's published version, giving the whole workspace a friendly, low-pressure signal about what landed well.

What is still in progress

Because UpdateTinus is in early access, a few parts of this release are deliberately unfinished. Offline editing is not yet supported, very large galleries may load slowly, and we are still refining how comments behave when a block is moved. We will keep sharing what changes in future notes, and we would love to hear where the canvas helps and where it gets in your way.

Try it in the preview

If you are part of the early-access program, the Visual Canvas is switched on for new drafts automatically. Existing drafts can be opened on the canvas from the draft menu. Start with a small release, invite one teammate and see how it feels to shape the story together. Then tell us what you think through the feedback board; every suggestion is read by the team building it.