Gnome-PIM is the GNOME personal information manager, which consists of a calendar and a contact manager or addressbook.
The calendar program needs to present many interactive graphics displays, such as monthly calendars with captions for appointments, yearly calendars with marked busy days, and other views for weeks and days.
The contact manager program needs to display a familiar representation for ``business cards'', or the data that describes a personal contact.
Instead of drawing all of these displays by hand, Gnome-PIM uses the canvas to create these displays out of primitive canvas items such as lines and rectangles. This allows the application to invest more effort in event handling to give the best possible experience to the user, while leaving all the tricky display issues to the canvas.