Are you kidding?
What's the differences between your solution and Excalidraw from Google team?
Show HN: Scribble – Realtime Whiteboarding for Developers
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Re: Show HN: Scribble – Realtime Whiteboarding for Developers
#12Are you kidding? What's the differences between your solution and Excalidraw from Google team? https://excalidraw.com
It is explained on their home page:
> An acknowledgement to the contributors of the open source drawing tool Excalidraw. After using Excalidraw for some simple graphics and forking their repository to experiment with their architecture of the Web Canvas API in conjunction with Roughjs, we wondered if it was possible to give software engineers a set of common symbols that could be seamlessly created, almost as fluidly as a physical whiteboard.
Re: Show HN: Scribble – Realtime Whiteboarding for Developers
#13Are you kidding? What's the differences between your solution and Excalidraw from Google team? https://excalidraw.com
Totally understand where you’re coming from. Excalidraw is a great standalone whiteboard tool, which is why we forked it to start off our project. This includes some new features that we felt made the experience better for our use cases. For example:
- Slack app integration to make it easier to start whiteboarding sessions
- Adding the ability to save and load drawings with Google Drive
- Symbols that we commonly use (e.g., databases, clouds, tables)
- Removing features unnecessary to our use case (sloppy drawing mode, opacity, background colour customizability, etc.)
We're not monetizing this app—we wanted to share a tailored version of it that we found useful ourselves, and hope that you may find it useful too.
We’re open to any other concerns/questions as well.
Re: Show HN: Scribble – Realtime Whiteboarding for Developers
#14Any plans to open source/make a fork of exaclidraw? I love the collaboration features of this.
A core reason I love excalidraw so much is because of the handwritten and cartoony ability. It's fantastic and makes everything look like a draft. If that could be added and ease of use a tad nicer, I'd totally use this over Excalidraw for my teaching scratchpad!
Re: Show HN: Scribble – Realtime Whiteboarding for Developers
#15Any plans to open source/make a fork of exaclidraw? I love the collaboration features of this. A core reason I love excalidraw so much is because of the handwritten and cartoony ability. It's fantastic and makes everything look like a draft. If that could be added and ease of use a tad nicer, I'd totally use this over Excalidraw for my teaching scratchpad!
Hey, thanks for taking a look!
Excalidraw is a great tool and we believe their hosted instance also supports collaboration for multiple users. Open sourcing the project is not in our current plan as we’re focused on iterating and adding more integrations that we think are useful to software engineers based on feedback; however, we’re open to the idea in the future if we have more bandwidth to support an open source project.
Thanks for your feedback on the styling of shapes! We wanted to focus Scribble on building more software specific symbols (and we’re looking into adding more scalable support for even more symbols down the road. Part of that meant reducing the amount of styling choices to optimize for speed.
Curious if there’s anything in particular you enjoy about those styles for your use case of a teaching scratch pad?
Re: Show HN: Scribble – Realtime Whiteboarding for Developers
#16This looks useful, I use draw.io for this kind of thing but there's no collaboration on that so this could be handy. I used mural recently and was impressed with that. As it's described as a whiteboard and called "Scribble" I really expected to be able to use my cursor to draw on it.
Sorry about the confusing branding haha. We heard a lot of software developers express interest in a tool that provided easy access to all their frequently used symbols, but didn’t want the messiness of a cursor-controlled freehand. Curious, do you enjoy freehanding as opposed to structured symbols?
Re: Show HN: Scribble – Realtime Whiteboarding for Developers
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bringin…
My specific use case is to use it with an apple pencil. For example: I like using Google Jamboard's free form editing with an apple pencil.
> We found in our experience, most software developers either don’t have a tablet, or don’t use it regularly
It might be the case today, however if you were to merely plot the Monthly growth for the #users using pencil in 2020. It might show an increased adoption. This is my anecdotal guess, but I suppose you might have to substantiate this if you don't think free form drawing is not compelling