Canvas coordinates start at the upper-left corner, and extend down and to the right, with pixels as the units. Sometimes this bothers me.

I like thinking of positive Y as up. I don't always want to work with pixels as my units of measurement. Also, I like having the origin at the center. Fortunately the canvas provides a way for me to set all of this up the way I like it in one easy step: The setTransform method.

Drawing this unit circle is a good example of when it's handy to have logical dimensions decoupled from the actual pixel dimensions of the canvas. Once the transformation matrix is set up I can really just draw my circle at the origin with a radius of one. My line segment goes from (0,0) to (cos(theta), sin(theta)).

This is my current canvas initialization method. For the unit circle, I just call this.init_canvas(5.0).