Show HN: Scribble – Realtime Whiteboarding for Developers

Hey Hacker News,

Co-creator of Scribble here. My friends and I are three undergraduate engineering students, and we’re building a digital whiteboard for remote software engineering teams.

Earlier this year, we transitioned to remote work during our software internships because of COVID-19. We noticed that a big thing we missed was being able to just walk over to a coworker's desk and draw something out, or huddling around a whiteboard to brainstorm ideas. Sure, we can type paragraphs over Slack or schedule a Zoom call, but we found they drag on and take a long time to resolve. We tried a few digital whiteboards like LucidCharts or Draw.io, but found them clunky to create simple diagrams.

To fix this, we wanted to create Scribble with a few principles in mind:

1. Asking for help should feel as simple as tapping a coworker on the shoulder. We made a Slack App so you can hop onto a whiteboard mid-conversation with a simple command - just type /scribble into your channel and click join.

2. Digital whiteboards need to feel seamless for synchronous collaboration to work. We give simple shortcuts to all the symbols you need - that means no more searching through hundreds of shapes, or messy freehand on a trackpad. We’re also happy to hear feedback if you feel there are any symbols we missed!

3. It’s your data. We integrate with your own Google Drive sign on and storage solutions. That means zero personally identifiable information or intellectual property gets saved to our servers.

We were able to build a really responsive web app with the help of open source tools such as Excalidraw (their approach to rendering symbols using the Canvas API was very foundational to the way we designed it for other symbols), as well as your everyday favourite web tools such as React, Express, Socket.io, and Typescript.

If you’re a developer who’s been missing that shared context and spontaneous back and forth with your coworkers, we’d love for you to give Scribble a try and let us know what you think!

I recently led taking a CS + ML school from in person to remote for 500 students. Most have gravitated towards Miro as the online whiteboard of choice. When you tried these options why did you feel they did not fulfill your need?

Very nice!. Do you have support for free form so I could use a stylus or apple pencil?

Thanks for taking a look! We currently do not have support for free-form drawing. We understood that this could be a valuable feature, but decided on not including it for now to give better access to other symbols that may be more commonly used. (eg. rectangle, circle, database etc.) We found in our experience, most software developers either don’t have a tablet, or don’t use it regularly for work.

Thanks for bringing this point up though! Curious as to what your use case is when thinking about using our app? We're still not 100% sure on the most useful symbols/tools to add, so as we get more feedback, we’re happy to look into including free-form drawing.

Thanks for bringing that point up! So just to reiterate for other people, the Hacker News link redirects to our landing page on Notion, which shows how to use a few features we thought would be useful to you (GDrive integration, Slack app etc.), and wanted to make sure that they were discoverable.

On a side note, Notion is also surprisingly good at quickly creating a simple landing page (easy formatting, gif support, collaborative editing, no code required)!