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Canvas — Notes for teams of nerds
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@rrhoover It's a crazy crowded space. I love it. :) Means no one has nailed it yet, lots of potential for us or someone to win.
Today, we're finding traction for 3 main reasons:
- 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.
Works really nicely. I like the idea of using this to collab on meeting notes as it's happening.
How have you been using canvas to build canvas @teich?
Would love to know about the tech stack as well, what are you using?
We have been using Canvas to build Canvas canvases. Here's an unedited example of some keyboard shortcut work (https://usecanvas.com/canvas/wor...).
As far as the tech stack goes:
- The web app and editor are written in Ember.js
- We use a Node.js backend for the real-time stuff along with some things that came out of Google Wave
- Our REST API (accounts, listing, orgs) is a Rails app
- Search is powered by Algolia
@professorz Yeah, with Quip you seem to be hitting your elbows on the folder system scaffolding system all the time.
Looks great. How can you defend yourself from quick changes from the likes of Quip and Google Docs? The functionality you have is great but wouldn't be much for others to compete with.
Grats on the launch! What tool do you see this replacing in people's workflow? Where do you find Canvas more useful than what we are used to doing today?
After reading the homepage I still don't understand exactly where this fits in with what I do at home/work
@anderson760 The teams using the beta today are using it to replace a bunch of things.
- gists for easy sharing
- google docs for taking meeting notes
- local editors for cranking out Markdown
- wikis to collect together information on the product process.
Teams are using the API (add .json to any canvas for example) to integrate into their workflow in some creative ways, for example taking the content form a canvas and publishing it to a blog, or filtering action items.
@teich thanks! That last one is something we're trying to solve for our website, we'll check this out
@teich @anderson760 You might look at Action (meetaction.com) for an interesting addition to meeting notes -- tasks (checkboxes in Canvas that have @mentions) on the same line) are automatically pulled into a post-meeting email and sent off to the assignees. In Action they are managed as Google Docs, however.
Big fan of Canvas, we've been using it for months in alpha testing. It's one of my tabs that stays open all day now.
Yes, it's similar to Google Docs, but the writing experience is better on Canvas, love the dedicated iOS app. This is a case where less is more. Also, sort of fun there are hidden features (edit URL to end in .md, .html, .json to get the content represented this way).
I'm excited to see where the team takes the product from here.
I've been using the Canvas beta for several months — it's awesome. Sharing ideas is so fast, and I love the "Markdown folding." Highly recommended 👍🏻
Interesting, I built something like this for myself over the weekend because I love markdown and I wanted to blog, but not in a chronological manner. Rather, as a wiki-ed structure. I call it Giki (https://giki.wiki)
It's free, and it seems to have 1 more feature: Search
Hi Product Hunt. Over the past few months we've had some great beta users, excited to open Canvas up to the world.
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 .md to the URL and see what happens.
This is brilliant. It's so simple to bring up the collaborations and I could see this being really useful. I'm in a bit of a limbo right now with notes. I use Notes.app from Apple, but it's limited in that it doesn't share notes, so I'm using OneNote in my office but the interface isn't great.. Canvas could actually really be a genuine replacement for me. Great job team!
@teich I think this is a good product that is versatile enough to fit to most people's workflow. 🔥
q:
1. Is it possible to add delete/archive function for each of the notes on the main page?
2. Which third party service do you use for your customer feedback button on the bottom right corner? I see a lot of websites are using this. Thanks!
@brianmulyadi thanks Brian. Yes, we want to improve the UI overall more. Always be iterating. Intercom is the widget. Great tool.
I’ve been using it daily for the last few weeks and it’s really great. Markdown folding is exactly how I always thought Markdown editors should work and it’s the first collaborative writing-tool that just works as you’d expect.
Works pretty smoothly. Even without the collaborative aspect, it is an awesome markdown editor. All the ones I've used, separated the code and the preview. It is very cool to use one where they are interlaced. (Is this type of markdown editor very rare, or is it me who is a bit ignorant in this matter).
@netarum It's rare. So far the only one I've come across besides Canvas is "Folding Text" and they should get the credit for the idea. We spent quite a bit of time figuring out when to collapse/expand and after what delay.
As far as why not a lot of other editors do it: it's unconventional and takes a little time to get used to. It can be scary to make product decisions like that. At Canvas we believe in optimizing our interfaces for the intermediate user (vs. the beginner).
@netarum The real-time wiki Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com) works in a similar way. We're building upon the open source project ProseMirror (https://prosemirror.net/) which supports this type of markdown editing by default.
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