Montreal Tech Watch

ThBll was already mentionned on MontrealTechWatch recently, as well as canvious when it was tested at the usability fix sessions at bolidea, but the applications were never officially launched or presented to the community.

Gregory Whiteside (@paisible) took the opportunity to present the new web development tool at the latest Montreal NewTech. The event gathers mostly developers, entrepreneurs and geeks, so it was a good match to present canvious.

Unless many other web services who would invest heavily on fancy graphics and other multimedia features, canvious is at the first glance a new generation of web application who is not afraid to present an utilitarian interface. The HTML5 creation process reminds me of a mix of vim and visual basic, with many windows and dependancies to setup, plus a text-heavy interface.

Gregory Whiteside highlighted his consulting experience, making content management systems for corporate customers, and trying to find tools that would empower webmasters and website developers. Canvious lets web developers create the structure of the site, but you can also use the same interface to edit the content, which is a new way of developing websites, since most teams separate content creation from the back-end development. Canvious hopes to offer a hosted service, with customers redirecting to Canvious’s servers. Gregory Whiteside said that based on early feedback from web agencies, Canvious would be good for small marketing projects, such as contests, landing pages, a quick intranet, or for the website of a small business. Those agencies also said though that big accounts would still need dedicated web development.

Canvious is certainly a unique and original approach. We’re still trying to see the potential of HTML5 / CSS3. Just today, Adobe announced a new tool to transform flash content to HTML5. More and more developers are also turning to HTML5 for mobile apps, and cross-platform services. Canvious is into that industry trend and if it gets enough traction from developers, for instance by having a good development environment (keyboard shortcuts, modules, plugins etc.), it might just take the web agency industry by storm, if not the web development world.