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".
Does the trademark office just rubber stamp anything they get and let the lawyers fight it out? IANAL, but these look pretty similar:
85632326 (Instructure):
IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Application service provider (ASP) featuring software to enable uploading, posting, showing, displaying, tagging, blogging, sharing or otherwise providing electronic media or information over the Internet or other communications network
86642511 (Canvas Labs):
IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: 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
The trademark office will catch it sometimes but the onus is typically on the trademark holder to monitor & object to any trademark filings that might conflict with ones they've registered.
"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. If a trademark becomes generic, often as a result of improper use, rights in the mark may no longer be enforceable.
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.
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.
The service they provide is essentially a canvas. They go through great lengths to provide to the user the abstraction of a canvas. So this would be analogous to a chainsaw company selling a product named "Chainsaw".
Crucially, the USPTO disagrees with you (although, who knows? That could change in the future). Is the company providing a canvas, or a collaboration tool that uses an abstraction of a canvas to operate? I think that you're conflating what a thing is with how that thing is constructed. It is a collaboration tool. It uses a canvas. "Canvas" isn't a generic word within the realm of SaaS collaboration tools, so a trademark on that name, in that context, should be valid.
In your example, a chainsaw company could produce a product called Chainsaw, but it couldn't (shouldn't be able to, at least) gain a trademark for that name.
Would you say that a chainsaw renting company could call itself "Chainsaw" (because it "uses" chainsaws as a means to provide the user with sawing capabilities)?
The generic-term exclusion would apply if and only if the word canvas was the generic -- as in the literal dictionary definition -- of the product.
That's why you can't register a trademark for "electric car" or "autonomous vehicle" or "html web page" for an electric car, autonomous vehicle or html web page business.
If you could, other manufacturers would not be able to describe their goods without infringing your mark. Since the product in question is metaphorically like a canvas, but is neither 1) a heavy-duty, plain-weave fabric; nor 2) the <canvas> html tag, another company could create a competing product and market it without using the word canvas, no problem. Hence, the generic exclusion would not apply.
They identified the services in their trademark application, and it was approved for publication. (edit: Just to further support your point. Canvas isn't a generic word describing their services.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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) 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
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?
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...
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.
Is 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.
According to the formatting guide under the ? in the top-right corner, JavaScript is ```js instead of ```javascript. A few other languages worked as well (Ruby, C, Java, Scheme), although I couldn't figure out Clojure.
Would be nice to have a link to whatever syntax highlighting library is used under the hood for this, but overall works pretty well as a test for me.
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.)
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?
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 Cheers. Congrats to the canvas launch! All covered on @manuscriptsnews ;-)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
So, "Canvas Labs, Inc.", bravo!
Additional edit below:
Trademark was approved on March 26, 2016 to be published on May 3, 2016.