Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds • Hacker News Board

Re: Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds

#41

Post by andybak » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 8:11 PM UTC

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?

Re: Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds

#42

Post by amelius » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 8:15 PM UTC

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #35

amelius wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Canvas" is a generic term found in the dictionary. IANAL, but I suspect nobody can claim it as a trademark. I found this about it: > 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. I…

The operative words there are "for the goods and/or services identified in the application". "Canvas" is not a generic term for a notetaking/documentation platform such as this. "Wiki" probably would be. "Apple" is trademarked if you're using it to describe a computer.

Canvas is a generic term for something you draw or write on. Even in the context of computing. See for example the HTML canvas.

Re: Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds

#43

Post by PeCaN » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 8:18 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #41

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…

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/

Re: Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds

#44

Post by Qworg » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 8:42 PM UTC

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.

Re: Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds

#45

Post by seagreen » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 8:52 PM UTC

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... 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?

Re: Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds

#46

Post by khedoros » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 8:57 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #42

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The operative words there are "for the goods and/or services identified in the application". "Canvas" is not a generic term for a notetaking/documentation platform such as this. "Wiki" probably would be. "Apple" is trademarked if you're using it to describe a computer.

Canvas is a generic term for something you draw or write on. Even in the context of computing. See for example the HTML canvas.

Those statements are all true, but they aren't an argument against the company being able to own a trademark on "Canvas".

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.

Re: Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds

#47

Post by petetnt » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 9:02 PM UTC

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.

Re: Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds

#48

Post by waldrews » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

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...

Re: Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds

#49

Post by jclem » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 9:21 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #20

ofbriggs wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently firefox is blocked by this, and some other related APIs: 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.

You built your project on an API that just became a working draft? What do you do when it inevitably changes?

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.

Re: Canvas: Notes for teams of nerds

#50

Post by verst » Tue, Mar 29, 2016, 9:22 PM UTC

vulpino wrote: post #24

yesimahuman wrote: post #23

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 thi…

I've been really happy with Dropbox Paper (invite only right now, http://paper.dropbox.com , an article overviewing it: 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).

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.