
Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds - ryanmickle
https://usecanvas.com
======
spdustin
Instructure, the company behind Canvas LMS, is a pretty big company, and their
software is used by many, many companies/educational institutions.

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...](http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=86642511&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch)

So, "Canvas Labs, Inc.", bravo!

Additional edit below:

Trademark was approved on March 26, 2016 to be published on May 3, 2016.

~~~
jspiral
Yes, I thought this was going to be a repurposing of something in the LMS

~~~
phaedryx
Same

------
polymeris
Am super frustrated with how buggy Evernote is, and would be interested in an
alternative, but...

"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.

~~~
ofbriggs
Currently firefox is blocked by this, and some other related APIs:
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/Events/selectio...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/Events/selectionchange)

Once dom.select_events.enabled defaults to true, we'll be able to polyfill
most of the other missing APIs.

~~~
kuschku
You built your project on an API that just became a working draft?

What do you do when it inevitably changes?

~~~
jclem
Like the "read more" link about FF support says, we plan on supporting it and
IE10+ in the future.

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.

~~~
kuschku
If that’s the case, then why develop based on a browser that isn’t even the
most used browser anyway?

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.

~~~
jclem
The overwhelming majority of the traffic we've seen so far has been Chrome and
Safari, even from HN.

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.

~~~
moron4hire
It is trivially easy to poll it in an animation loop.

------
tomdale
We've been beta testing Canvas on the Ember core team for a few months now and
it has been _awesome_.

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.

------
wnevets
This is going to sound silly but the crooked box at the bottom of the home
page is so off putting.

~~~
fluxquanta
It was hard for me to get past "we need a workbench for our [lightbulb]", but
that crooked box sealed the deal.

~~~
skeoh
Is that what it was? I am on a non-emoji environment so all I saw was "for our
[]".

------
teich
Hi HN. Canvas lays the foundation for some great long term plans. Long term is
great, but why use Canvas today?

\- 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.

------
grimgrin
It looks nice and works well, except for the few things I found:

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.

------
wilde
If their team is wondering why mobile users are bouncing, it's because it
takes 20s for the page to render anything:

[http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160329_KP_15JS/](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160329_KP_15JS/)

------
seagreen
What's your data format? Good programmers will care as much about that as how
your UI works.

I see you've got a formatting guide: [https://usecanvas.com/about/formatting-
guide/0DZTK4lz2cWsqOn...](https://usecanvas.com/about/formatting-
guide/0DZTK4lz2cWsqOnKzISLPq) 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?

~~~
jclem
If you're asking what we're storing in the database, that data is a plain
string with some special delimiters in it denoting line types and metadata
about the content.

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...](https://usecanvas.com/about/canvas/55h8GVkBfi5Lnr2Becv5tB.json)

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.

~~~
seagreen
Nice, that definitely answers my question. When you do decide on how to export
history please write a blog post or something about it, I'm curious to see
what you come up with.

------
jaymoorthi
It feels a lot like Hackpad, which is great.

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?

~~~
teich
Yes, giving you some better controls is on the list. love to hear more about
your specific needs - drop me an email oren@usecanvas

------
elcapitan
From the name I expected some kind of whiteboard-drawing tool and was a bit
disappointed, but probably only because I read about similar tools on another
thread
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11381885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11381885)).

------
gmfawcett
Is there some place I've never been where technical workers enjoy being called
nerds? If someone called me a nerd, I'd tell them where to shove it -- and I
certainly wouldn't buy into their product! The Canvas people should seriously
rethink their branding.

~~~
cwb71
Have you been to San Francisco or the Silicon Valley?

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](https://vimeo.com/73589975)

~~~
tenpies
> the term nerd is often considered a badge of honor

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.

~~~
cwb71
No, it makes you a second-wave nerd with hipster tendencies.

(I of course just made that up.)

------
kiejo
Your tool looks interesting, congrats on your beta launch! I'd be interested
in the technologies you used to build the editor, especially the real-time
collaboration part. What libraries are you using or is it something custom
built? I'm working on something similar
([https://www.nuclino.com](https://www.nuclino.com)) and we've been pretty
happy with ProseMirror as the basis of our editor so far. Here's our HN post
from a few weeks ago, if you're interested:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11211241](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11211241)

------
aubreyjohnson
Facebook launched 'Canvas' today too

[https://canvas.facebook.com/](https://canvas.facebook.com/)

(｀_´)ゞ

~~~
erikpukinskis
Yea that's gonna keep happening. Canvas is not an obscure metaphor in
computing.

------
andybak
I've tried to switch from plain text to markdown for notes but the numbered
lists drive me mad. A common process is that I want to insert a comment in the
middle of a numbered to do list.

    
    
      1.. thing
      2.. another thing
      
        Please clarify this point
      
      3.. something
      4.. else
    

Took me a while to figure out how to break lists. I'd love it if there was
some way to tell markdown to not renumber my lists too...

I know this is tricky in wysiwyg editors too but surely it's a fairly common
task?

~~~
PeCaN
Obligatory "org-mode[1] does that very well".

Anyway if you put two spaces after "another thing" ("2\. another thing
\nPlease clarify...") it should render the way you want.

1\. [http://orgmode.org/](http://orgmode.org/)

------
yesimahuman
This looks awesome, been oscillating between Google Keep, OneNote, and Quiver,
but never entirely satisfied.

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...

~~~
vulpino
I've been really happy with Dropbox Paper (invite only right now,
[http://paper.dropbox.com](http://paper.dropbox.com), an article overviewing
it: [http://www.techinsider.io/hands-on-with-dropbox-
paper-2015-1...](http://www.techinsider.io/hands-on-with-dropbox-
paper-2015-10)).

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).

~~~
verst
Came here to say the same thing. Extremely similar to Dropbox Paper.

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.

~~~
jclem
Let me know how it goes! jonathan [at] usecanvas [dot] com

------
cohomologo
Whenever I see some new markdown thing, the first thing I do is check to see
if math is supported, since most of my writing/collaboration uses math. Even
my personal todo list needs math from time to time.

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.)

------
fallo
Whats with the weird unicode characters on the homepage in firefox on windows?
And not working in firefox?

------
fuzionmonkey
This is awesome! Just today I was looking for collaborative Markdown editor
with nice previews/rendering.

There needs to be the ability to ability to add comments to documents, though.
Without commenting, the "collaborative" aspect is severely limited.

------
melvinmt
Who would want to take notes in a -1 degree angle?

------
kelvin0
Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds not using FF.

------
vr3690
Confused about the positioning (or is targeting a better word?). Why only
nerds? From the looks of it, anybody can use the app. Or only "nerds" know
about Markdown?

------
geraldbauer
FYI:If anyone is interested in following along how markdown "conquers" the
world of writing. You're invited to follow along on the world's first markdown
news channel @manuscriptsnews ->
[https://twitter.com/manuscriptsnews](https://twitter.com/manuscriptsnews)
Cheers. Congrats to the canvas launch! All covered on @manuscriptsnews ;-)

------
petetnt
Some feedback: CTRL + space on Chrome 49 seems to be the hotkey for "We're
still a bit buggy and hit a wall. We've reported the error and disabled the
editor to prevent data loss.".

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.

~~~
jclem
Weird...What OS are you on? Or email me at jonathan [at] usecanvas [dot] com,
if you don't mind.

------
jda0
Loved trying it - been waiting for an cross-platform improvement on iA
Writer's markdown editor - but tried to sign up and hit a 503 D:

Would love math support too, but I guess you've got plenty to do anyway for
now.

~~~
jda0
Got it to work. Just waiting for mobile support now :D

------
waldrews
I just wish some notetaking program besides OneNote had the feature that
inserts the source URL when you paste text from the browser. Some Firefox
extensions will add the URL when you're copying, but I haven't seen that on
Chrome yet...

~~~
moron4hire
That's a hack from the site from which you're copying, not OneNote.

~~~
ygra
Uhm, no. When sites do that, OneNote has the URL twice. Evidently the source
URL is part of the HTML clipboard format.

------
Qworg
This looks a lot like Wave, just within a single company, rather than
federated. I'm wondering what has changed that would make this successful now
vs. before.

------
mesozoic
Whatever that big box at the bottom that is slightly tilted is, it hurts my
head.

------
thebiglebrewski
Are you worried you'll get sued by Instructure/Blackboard?

~~~
dkuntz2
Where do they overlap? Or is it the product name? In which case it seems far
more likely that they'll ask for the name to be changed first, before moving
to litigation.

------
kentt
ctrl + z doesn't undo ctrl + backspace up down end home doesn't do what you'd
expect

------
dipnuggetron
relevant:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJyMT4ZVQEc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJyMT4ZVQEc)

