7 ms·
Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds
- teich 11y agoHi 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.
- dipnuggetron 11y agorelevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJyMT4ZVQEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJyMT4ZVQEc
- geraldbauer 11y agoFYI: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 ;-)
- polymeris 11y agoAm 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 11y agoCurrently firefox is blocked by this, and some other related APIs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/selectionchange https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/selectio... Once dom.select_events.enabled defaults to true, we'll be able to polyfill most of the other missing APIs.
- moron4hire 11y agoI can think of a way to hack it in, and I'm open for consulting contracts.
- kuschku 11y agoYou built your project on an API that just became a working draft? What do you do when it inevitably changes?
- RealCasually 11y agoChange their project?
- nathancahill 11y agoHappens all the time. Such a terrible thing. I love this article that was posted here a couple days ago: https://blog.runspired.com/2016/03/25/the-chrome-distortion-chrome-alters-our-expectations-in-highly-negative-ways/ https://blog.runspired.com/2016/03/25/the-chrome-distortion-... 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.
- jclem 11y agoLike 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 11y agoIf 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.
- revorad 11y agoHere's my obligatory recommendation for Simplenote. It is so good - http://simplenote.com http://simplenote.com No affiliation, just a happy user.
- thebiglebrewski 11y agoAre you worried you'll get sued by Instructure/Blackboard?
- dkuntz2 11y agoWhere 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.
- jaymoorthi 11y agoIt 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 11y agoYes, giving you some better controls is on the list. love to hear more about your specific needs - drop me an email oren@usecanvas
- wnevets 11y agoThis is going to sound silly but the crooked box at the bottom of the home page is so off putting.
- gh-lfneu28 11y agoI concur, it feels design-y in the bad sense and makes me want to close the page asap.
- fluxquanta 11y agoIt was hard for me to get past "we need a workbench for our [lightbulb]", but that crooked box sealed the deal.
- skeoh 11y agoIs that what it was? I am on a non-emoji environment so all I saw was "for our []".
- soffes 11y agoHah. Fair.
- archagon 11y agoReally? I love it. Serves to deliniate the "screenshot" quite well.
- devindotcom 11y agoNot silly. It's killing me.
- elcapitan 11y agoFrom 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).
- wilde 11y agoIf 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/
- spdustin 11y agoInstructure, 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_NO&searchType=statusSearch 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.
- fallo 11y agoWhats with the weird unicode characters on the homepage in firefox on windows? And not working in firefox?
- yesimahuman 11y agoThis 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 11y agoI'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-2015-10 http://www.techinsider.io/hands-on-with-dropbox-paper-2015-1...). 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 11y agoCame 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 11y agoLet me know how it goes! jonathan [at] usecanvas [dot] com
- kyleashipley 11y agoIs Dropbox Paper planning integrations with third parties? I can already do basic collaborative editing in Google Docs, and it sounds like Paper is similar to that. The killer feature for me (when shipped) is being able to drop in native representations from the other tools I used heavily (Slack, Trello, GitHub, etc) into a document that I'm collaborating on. 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.
- melvinmt 11y agoWho would want to take notes in a -1 degree angle?
- kelvin0 11y agoCanvas: Notes for teams of nerds not using FF.
- grimgrin 11y agoIt 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.
- aubreyjohnson 11y agoFacebook launched 'Canvas' today too https://canvas.facebook.com/ https://canvas.facebook.com/ (｀_´)ゞ
- erikpukinskis 11y agoYea that's gonna keep happening. Canvas is not an obscure metaphor in computing.
- kiejo 11y agoYour 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
- vr3690 11y agoConfused 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?
- tomdale 11y agoWe'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.
- andybak 11y agoI'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 11y agoObligatory "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/
- Qworg 11y agoThis 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.
- seagreen 11y agoWhat'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/0DZTK4lz2cWsqOnKzISLPq 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?
- jclem 11y agoIf 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.json 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.
- seagreen 11y agoNice, 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.
- petetnt 11y agoSome 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 11y agoWeird...What OS are you on? Or email me at jonathan [at] usecanvas [dot] com, if you don't mind.
- waldrews 11y agoI 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 11y agoThat's a hack from the site from which you're copying, not OneNote.
- ygra 11y agoUhm, no. When sites do that, OneNote has the URL twice. Evidently the source URL is part of the HTML clipboard format.
- gmfawcett 11y agoIs 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 11y agoHave 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 11y ago> 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 11y agoNo, it makes you a second-wave nerd with hipster tendencies. (I of course just made that up.)
- cohomologo 11y agoWhenever 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.)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- fuzionmonkey 11y agoThis 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.
- mesozoic 11y agoWhatever that big box at the bottom that is slightly tilted is, it hurts my head.
- jda0 11y agoLoved 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 11y agoGot it to work. Just waiting for mobile support now :D
- kentt 11y agoctrl + z doesn't undo ctrl + backspace up down end home doesn't do what you'd expect