Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds
usecanvas.com
usecanvas.com
It could be argued that Canvas (the notes app here) is confusingly similar to Canvas LMS wiki pages. I hate being the guy to suggest a name change, but it may be something to consider before you get a lot of traction. I definitely understand the instinctive "fuck no" response to the suggestion that you change the name of something you clearly poured your heart and soul into, so please don't shoot the messenger here. Just wanted to bring it to your attention, in case you weren't aware.
EDIT BELOW:
Well, I'm pleased to say that this company did at least some kind of due diligence in this case. They applied for and received a trademark for the Service Mark (with the Standard Character Mark type) "CANVAS", covering "software as a service (SaaS) services featuring software used to allow collaboration between users for sharing information; software as a service (SaaS) services featuring software to create, structure, edit, access, integrate, manage, interpret and synchronize documents, content and data between users".
http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=86642511&caseType=SERIAL_N...
So, "Canvas Labs, Inc.", bravo!
Additional edit below:
Trademark was approved on March 26, 2016 to be published on May 3, 2016.
> Generic terms are common words or terms, often found in the dictionary, that identify products and services and are not specific to any particular source. It is not possible to register as a trademark a term that is generic for the goods and/or services identified in the application. If a trademark becomes generic, often as a result of improper use, rights in the mark may no longer be enforceable.
They identified the services in their trademark application, and it was approved for publication. (edit: Just to further support your point. Canvas isn't a generic word describing their services.)
Canvas isn't "a term that is generic for the goods and/or services identified in the application". "Software as a Service" would be, and so would "Collaboration Software".
A company called "Chainsaw" could be a lumberjack company. One called "Chisels" could provide stone masonry services. This, despite the fact that those are generic words for tools that would be reasonably expected to be in use for those kinds of work.
In your example, a chainsaw company could produce a product called Chainsaw, but it couldn't (shouldn't be able to, at least) gain a trademark for that name.
The users are using the canvas, not the company.
Would you say that a chainsaw renting company could call itself "Chainsaw" (because it "uses" chainsaws as a means to provide the user with sawing capabilities)?
That's why you can't register a trademark for "electric car" or "autonomous vehicle" or "html web page" for an electric car, autonomous vehicle or html web page business.
If you could, other manufacturers would not be able to describe their goods without infringing your mark. Since the product in question is metaphorically like a canvas, but is neither 1) a heavy-duty, plain-weave fabric; nor 2) the <canvas> html tag, another company could create a competing product and market it without using the word canvas, no problem. Hence, the generic exclusion would not apply.
(IANAL. However, was married to a trademark attorney for over ten years, picked up some things. Also, wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_distinctiveness#Gene...)
85632326 (Instructure):
IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Application service provider (ASP) featuring software to enable uploading, posting, showing, displaying, tagging, blogging, sharing or otherwise providing electronic media or information over the Internet or other communications network
86642511 (Canvas Labs):
IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: software as a service (SaaS) services featuring software used to allow collaboration between users for sharing information; software as a service (SaaS) services featuring software to create, structure, edit, access, integrate, manage, interpret and synchronize documents, content and data between users
"We currently only support your browser in read-only mode. Read more."
You don't support firefox!? It's not like it's some obscure browser.
Also the demo canvas on the landing page being slightly tilted to the left freaks me out.
Once dom.select_events.enabled defaults to true, we'll be able to polyfill most of the other missing APIs.
What do you do when it inevitably changes?
Currently working on a project that only supports Chrome. Turns out it was only using a couple experimental APIs that were easily replaced by small libraries/polyfills. The Chrome blinders are real.
This doesn't mean "we are waiting for them to fully support this working draft", but rather that we haven't implemented polyfills for the (relatively small) number of APIs missing, yet. When/if the spec changes significantly, these polyfills should carry us until we can change the non-polyfilled version of the code.
Especially devs have a quite equal share between Firefox and Chrome (due to the privacy implications of Chrome), so using private extensions that are non-standard, and, according to what you say, irrelevant for your product has to be quite an irrational move.
That being said, that wasn't necessarily the driving factor in the "use the fancy selection APIs" decision. There were many factors, but for one thing, choosing to use those APIs, while limiting our browser support (for a limited amount of time) helped us get to where we are now at a quicker pace than if we'd opted for much broader browser support from day 1.
One of the challenges here for Firefox is that there's not an API to determine when a user's selection changes. We need this in order for inline markdown to collapse/expand as the cursor comes within proximity of it. It's definitely possible to poly-fill this, we just haven't done it, yet :\ We could disable this for Firefox, but I'd rather ship Firefox support with the rad stuff that the other major browsers already get.
No affiliation, just a happy user.
Markdown is the lingua franca of open source, but until Canvas, none of the online collaboration tools we used understood it. Not only does Canvas support Markdown, it supports programmer-flavored Markdown, with great support for things like checkboxes and code fencing. It's become an indispensable part of how we build open source software online.
Just a few of the ways we use Canvas:
1. Writing feature proposals/documentation side by side with someone
2. Taking collaborative meeting minutes during the weekly core team Google Hangout
3. 12+ of us sitting around a couch, writing an agenda for our quarterly in-person meetings
Canvas is all about small details that continue to delight as you learn it. I think my favorite "hidden" feature is that you can add `.md` to the end of any document URL and it serves up a static Markdown file, making data export incredibly easy.
- Focused on flow. Folding to merge preview and editing modes. Markdown to keep fingers on keys. - Absurdly easy sharing. URLs are magic. Start up a meeting, share the URL in Slack - Hackable. Make it easy to integrate into your workflows and systems. No lock in.
Love for you folks to try it, and give us feedback. The quickest way to get a feel is to hit the try button, share the URL to write with friends, then append .json to the URL and see what happens.
Clicking into a link expands it making editing very easy. I think the same should happen for images. I click the example "boom" image and it just focuses it. I can remove it, but cannot edit (as far as I can tell).
Backspace over some text to remove it. Press ctrl-z. Nothing happens, except it does register something, because try backspacing again. You'll notice it doesn't actually remove the next character, almost as if it's removing something you cannot see. Press ctrl-z 5x in a row and then press backspace 5x, to see what I mean.
I see you've got a formatting guide: https://usecanvas.com/about/formatting-guide/0DZTK4lz2cWsqOn... Do you have a more formal specification for your format?
More importantly, how do you handle history? If I spend a year putting notes into Canvas and then have to switch for some reason (which might happen no matter how awesome Canvas is) what will I get when I export my notes?
At the application level, we're typically working with a version of that data that's structured a little bit more like this: https://usecanvas.com/about/canvas/55h8GVkBfi5Lnr2Becv5tB.js...
Currently, exporting your canvas will give you the format above, or `.markdown`, or `.html`. To answer your second question, we use operational transformation for the collaborative part of the platform, so we do have some history of operations on a canvas, but haven't quite decided for how long we'll be retaining that history and how we can best make it available to users.
One of the main issues we had with Hackpad, though, was that the collaborative editing led to it being used for note-taking with third-parties, and it was really easy to inadvertently share a document by putting it into a space that was public or shared.
What are your plans with Canvas to make sharing easy within a team, and but less error prone for sharing outside?
It has been my experience in tech companies and social circles that the term nerd is often considered a badge of honor and is even used to refer to one's self and friends.
See also https://vimeo.com/73589975
N = 1, but in my experience this stopped being the case when being nerdy was deemed cool and anyone with glasses started proclaiming "I'm so nerdy".
I suppose this sort of makes me a hipster.
(I of course just made that up.)
(｀_´)ゞ
1.. thing
2.. another thing
Please clarify this point
3.. something
4.. else
I know this is tricky in wysiwyg editors too but surely it's a fairly common task?
Anyway if you put two spaces after "another thing" ("2. another thing \nPlease clarify...") it should render the way you want.
To me, code highlighting and checkboxes that ident properly like an outline are key, and they seem to be well done here. Minor thing: tried ```javascript and it didn't work, doing ``` did engage the code editor but I can't seem to select the language.
Congrats on the launch, will be spending more time with this later...
Canvas looks strikingly similar to this (almost exactly the same aesthetically), and I'm curious what the "killer feature(s)" are which give it an advantage over Paper, which is developed by a much larger company (Dropbox).
I haven't been that happy with Dropbox Paper though. It doesn't handle basic things like bullets in indented blocks, or line/paragraph breaks in numbered lists. Hackpad (Dropbox acquisition) didn't look as nice, but had more functionality. Now Paper is replacing Hackpad.
I'll be giving Canvas a try.
For example, right now in a Google Doc if I want to connect it to a Trello list I need to add a bullet for each card in the list, make it a link to the card, and keep both things in sync. What if I could just drop in the whole list (or even a whole board in some cases) and have my project plan and my specific cards in the same context without jumping between different tools? That's a killer feature for me if they can pull it off.
Would be nice to have a link to whatever syntax highlighting library is used under the hood for this, but overall works pretty well as a test for me.
I think its pretty easy to add math support by adding MathJax to your HTML template (e.g. as used in the markdown implementations of StackExchange, Jupyter Notebook, Quiver and such.)
There needs to be the ability to ability to add comments to documents, though. Without commenting, the "collaborative" aspect is severely limited.
Actually now pretty much anything I do brings up that message plus: vendor-6d85b06….js:31 Uncaught Error: opAcknowledged called from a null state. This should never happen.
Would love math support too, but I guess you've got plenty to do anyway for now.