The Law of Three

The popular saying is that good things comes in threes. The American Constitution promises: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Even the planet we live on is the third from the Sun!

If last week is any measure, three events made it an awesome seven days for us.

First, we took a bold move to rebrand from Canvas to GoCanvas. While it may seem like a small change, it actually has a big impact. Most of our customers already know us best from our web site, which from beginning has been GoCanvas.com. So it makes good sense to harmonize the brand name and make us even easier to find.

Being empathetic to the challenges our subscribers face to run and grow their business, GoCanvas is also a great description of their journey with us. We help our customers Go somewhere that is new and different, with the confidence that Canvas is a destination where you can do something great for your company.

This week also saw the 9th major update of our platform. Improving the way our customers engage with GoCanvas is always a cause for celebration. But when we completely refresh our look and feel, it really stands out. GoCanvas 9 has now gone live, delivering a more fluid and intuitive customer experience on the web site. So, whether creating a digital version of a simple document or rewriting the way work is dispatched to field teams, it’s now even easier to collect important business information and automate your business processes.

Now to the third great thing that happened last week.

Hearing from our customers is how our inspiration begins. We firmly believe that shared knowledge is what sparks innovation. What was originally planned as a round table with 5 or so customers giving us feedback on new features, had to be rapidly rethought.. over 100 wanted to attend!

We decided to hold our first user conference: Transform.

It was exciting to hear people sharing how GoCanvas is the solution to their everyday operational headaches. Our thanks go out to Ed from Post Brands and Fran from Apex – each took the stage to give awesome presentations, showing the practical and impactful ways that GoCanvas helps them run and grow their business. It was real team effort at our HQ in Reston to bring everything together and heartening to receive the great feedback from the customers who attended. We look forward to holding Transform 2018 and will definitely need a bigger venue!

The brand name may have changed and the web site refreshed, but not our passion for innovating and creating impact for our customers. We are continually finding new ways not just to automate paperwork but go much farther, delivering moments that surprise, delight and help drive better results. We have some amazing things planned for 2018.

Welcome to the new GoCanvas!

This release is all about improving our mobile app software for Android, iOS and our Windows Desktop App. For iOS we are excited to release functionality that leverages Apple’s latest operating system. We hope this helps our mobile users have a better and more productive experience when filling out forms with GoCanvas.

iOS Features

Apple has released their latest version of iOS and here at GoCanvas our mobile developers have been exploring the new software and beta testing it for a few months now.  We have added a couple of features to leverage new functionality offered by Apple.

Photo “Keyboard”

This feature is available when capturing photos with GoCanvas. Your photo gallery and a capture screen appear where your keyboard normally appears. The screen within the Canvas form you are filling out remains in place. We hope this saves mobile users a few seconds per photo by reducing the number of clicks it takes to capture photos with GoCanvas. If you pull photos from your gallery regularly, this will save you a lot of time.

Multi-Tasking – Enhanced with iOS 11

The multi-tasking capability that Apple launched in a previous release was enhanced with iOS 11. We now allow you to multi-task with GoCanvas.  This allows you to run two apps side by side on your iPad Air 2 or iPad Pro. So you can have your Photos app open on one side of your screen and Canvas on the other. You can quickly find the images you need to include with your GoCanvas submissions. Or if there are other apps you use for your job you can run that one along with Canvas. Our hope is that our mobile users gain some productivity benefits here saving valuable time while on the job.

Drag and Drop Photos – iOS 11

Thanks to iOS 11 we are now able to allow you to drag and drop photos into GoCanvas. Using the photo “keyboard” you can now drag photos from your gallery right into GoCanvas. Or if you are using our new multi-tasking feature you can drag photos from your Photos app right into Canvas. This only works on an iPad Air 2 or iPad Pro. Apple only supports it on those devices.

Pinch to Zoom on Photos

Customers have asked for this and we are happy to deliver it with this release. When you are previewing images you have captured with GoCanvas you are now able to pinch and zoom in on them. This will help you confirm if the picture you have taken captures what you were hoping to capture. Or if you are using Workflow and send a submission to another user that person can zoom in to get a better look at the image.

Android

Pinch to Zoom on Photos

As with iOS, we have released this feature for Android, too!

Canvas Windows Desktop App

Automatic App Restart

When we released our completely re-built Windows Desktop App there were some features we didn’t make available initially.  This was one of them.  This feature allows you to restart a Canvas form after a user hits the “Submit” button. So if you are using Canvas in a retail or kiosk environment (waivers, entering customer information, etc.) where your customers are filling out a Canvas form you can just have the form restart after the previous user hits the “Submit” button. This way you don’t have to have your customers tap on the name of the form to fill it out.

Feedback

Let us know what you think! We love feedback. You can send it to feedback@gocanvas.com.  Thank you!