Live rooms

Opening the canvas puts you in the room; closing the tab takes you out. There is no step in between for you to do.

A few things that trip people up:

• Rooms go by canvas, not by project. Two canvases in one project are two rooms, so if you are on canvas A and they are on canvas B you cannot see each other — to get together, switch to the same one (see 1.3).
• The row at the top-right never includes you, and one person with several tabs open still takes a single spot. Cursors go by window, though: you will see a cursor on the canvas wearing your own name; that is your other tab.
• Switching to the storyboard view does not leave the room, and the row at the top-right stays where it is (see 1.4).

Whether you can get into this room is the same question as whether you can open this canvas — there is no second set of switches:

• A canvas belongs to a project, and a project belongs to a space. A project in your personal space opens for you alone.
• Build the project in a team space and every team member who opens it lands in the same room. To have people edit alongside you, put the project in a team space and add them to the team.
• There is no "send someone a link to edit alongside you" route. Someone outside the space cannot get into this room, and sending them the link changes nothing — Share at the top-right hands out a read-only copy instead, and whoever opens that is not in the room, so you will not see them either.

• A dropped connection reconnects on its own; you do not have to refresh. Nothing anyone did during those few seconds is lost.
• Once reconnected it settles up with the server: what other people changed while you were away comes in, and what you changed while you were away is still yours.
• Switch to another tab and you leave the room for the moment — your avatar drops off everyone else's screen. Come back and it reconnects and settles up by itself. Leaving the page untouched for ten minutes does the same thing; one move of the mouse or one keypress brings you back.
• A refresh always shows you what is on the server. If it feels like something they just changed is missing on your side, refresh and it lines up.

The room only relays what people do, in real time; the content lives on the server — so whose browser crashed and who closed the page first has no bearing on what this canvas ends up looking like.