Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds

142 点作者 ryanmickle大约 9 年前

30 条评论

spdustin大约 9 年前

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".<a href="http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=86642511&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch" rel="nofollow">http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=86642511&caseType=SERIAL_N...</a>So, "Canvas Labs, Inc.", bravo!Additional edit below:Trademark was approved on March 26, 2016 to be published on May 3, 2016.

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polymeris大约 9 年前

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.

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tomdale大约 9 年前

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 someone2. Taking collaborative meeting minutes during the weekly core team Google Hangout3. 12+ of us sitting around a couch, writing an agenda for our quarterly in-person meetingsCanvas 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大约 9 年前

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

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teich大约 9 年前

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大约 9 年前

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大约 9 年前

If their team is wondering why mobile users are bouncing, it's because it takes 20s for the page to render anything:<a href="http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160329_KP_15JS/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160329_KP_15JS/</a>

seagreen大约 9 年前

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: <a href="https://usecanvas.com/about/formatting-guide/0DZTK4lz2cWsqOnKzISLPq" rel="nofollow">https://usecanvas.com/about/formatting-guide/0DZTK4lz2cWsqOn...</a> 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?

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jaymoorthi大约 9 年前

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?

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elcapitan大约 9 年前

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 (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11381885" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11381885</a>).

gmfawcett大约 9 年前

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.

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kiejo大约 9 年前

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 (<a href="https://www.nuclino.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.nuclino.com</a>) 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: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11211241" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11211241</a>

aubreyjohnson大约 9 年前

Facebook launched 'Canvas' today too<a href="https://canvas.facebook.com/" rel="nofollow">https://canvas.facebook.com/</a>(｀_´)ゞ

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andybak大约 9 年前

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.<pre><code> 1.. thing 2.. another thing Please clarify this point 3.. something 4.. else </code></pre> 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?

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yesimahuman大约 9 年前

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...

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cohomologo大约 9 年前

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大约 9 年前

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

fuzionmonkey大约 9 年前

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大约 9 年前

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

kelvin0大约 9 年前

Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds not using FF.

vr3690大约 9 年前

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大约 9 年前

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 -> <a href="https://twitter.com/manuscriptsnews" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/manuscriptsnews</a> Cheers. Congrats to the canvas launch! All covered on @manuscriptsnews ;-)

petetnt大约 9 年前

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.

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jda0大约 9 年前

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.

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waldrews大约 9 年前

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...

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Qworg大约 9 年前

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大约 9 年前

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

thebiglebrewski大约 9 年前

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

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kentt大约 9 年前

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

dipnuggetron大约 9 年前

relevant: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJyMT4ZVQEc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJyMT4ZVQEc</a>