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Witeboard

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Re: Witeboard

#51
Crash my lubuntu 18.04 session every time, when using firefox 80.0.1 (works fine with chromium though), Nvidia-driver 450.51.06, after waiting to load the screen goes black and blinks a few time.

Re: Witeboard

#52
Online whiteboards are just awful with a mouse, what's worked really well for my livestreams has been a WACOM like tablet that I can hook up via USB to my laptop or Desktop.

I got this, it's cheap and great https://www.amazon.com/GAOMON-M10K2018-Graphic-Pressure-Batt...

I use it to annotate pdfs and also with the MS whiteboard, it's not necessarily the best to collaborate with but I really like how I can zoom infinitely out to keep adding stuff. I prefer this setup over regular whiteboards for solo brainstorming sessions

Re: Witeboard

#53
post #48

I wrote "Hello World!" on witeboard.com using the active pen on my ThinkPad Yoga. It couldn't keep up with my writing and made a mess of it. Out of curiosity, I tried ziteboard.com (which came up in a search for "online whiteboard"), and it rendered my handwriting perfectly. Here are the results from the two sites: https://imgur.com/a/nCKMEKE I repeated the experiment on my Galaxy Note 8 with its active pen, with sim…

While you're trying things out, would you mind testing https://browserboard.com ? It's a little thing I made similar to these tools. It's not commercial, I just want to make sure it works well.

My pleasure! I love trying out stuff like this, especially in these days of trying to whiteboard remotely. As it is getting late, I may just make this a brief test right now.

A minor point to note is that the URL with the www does not work - you may want to fix this:

https://www.browserboard.com

Also I love this bit of humbleness:

> A pretty good online whiteboard

So on to the handwriting test. Yes! You are much closer to the Ziteboard experience. Pen input works very well on both the ThinkPad Yoga and the Note 8 and it renders my writing nicely.

You seem to be doing a similar kind of smoothing that Ziteboard does? When I write on Ziteboard I see a bit of angularity as I write, which gets smoothed out when I'm done. Yours seems to do this more in real time.

One thing I got confused on: trying it on the Note 8, I wanted to scroll the view to get some blank space to write on. I found the four headed arrow icon which did exactly what I wanted - I can now scroll the view with the pen or finger. But now I can't figure out how to get out of this mode and write again?

More later as I experiment with it...

Re: Witeboard

#55
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you're trying things out, would you mind testing https://browserboard.com ? It's a little thing I made similar to these tools. It's not commercial, I just want to make sure it works well.

My pleasure! I love trying out stuff like this, especially in these days of trying to whiteboard remotely. As it is getting late, I may just make this a brief test right now. A minor point to note is that the URL with the www does not work - you may want to fix this: https://www.browserboard.com Also I love this bit of humbleness: > A pretty good online whiteboard So on to the handwriting test. Yes! You are much clos…

The pan feature works like a "tool", so you can select any tool (pen, text, etc) to get back to drawing.

Touch interactions are definitely a work in progress, I just want to make sure they aren't broken for now. :-)

I'm doing fancy incremental line smoothing. It's not that hard, but no one else seems to do this, and it really bugs me. It takes some effort to understand how and make it performant, but it's such a nice boost to the feel of it, in my opinion.

Re: Witeboard

#56

I wrote "Hello World!" on witeboard.com using the active pen on my ThinkPad Yoga. It couldn't keep up with my writing and made a mess of it. Out of curiosity, I tried ziteboard.com (which came up in a search for "online whiteboard"), and it rendered my handwriting perfectly. Here are the results from the two sites: https://imgur.com/a/nCKMEKE I repeated the experiment on my Galaxy Note 8 with its active pen, with sim…

you have a beautiful handwriting

Re: Witeboard

#57
post #48

I wrote "Hello World!" on witeboard.com using the active pen on my ThinkPad Yoga. It couldn't keep up with my writing and made a mess of it. Out of curiosity, I tried ziteboard.com (which came up in a search for "online whiteboard"), and it rendered my handwriting perfectly. Here are the results from the two sites: https://imgur.com/a/nCKMEKE I repeated the experiment on my Galaxy Note 8 with its active pen, with sim…

While you're trying things out, would you mind testing https://browserboard.com ? It's a little thing I made similar to these tools. It's not commercial, I just want to make sure it works well.

I like it.

Its a little awkward that the line doesn't draw when your cursor / finger is held down, and only on release. Other than that, great. I had no dramas getting out of pan mode.

Re: Witeboard

#58

I wrote "Hello World!" on witeboard.com using the active pen on my ThinkPad Yoga. It couldn't keep up with my writing and made a mess of it. Out of curiosity, I tried ziteboard.com (which came up in a search for "online whiteboard"), and it rendered my handwriting perfectly. Here are the results from the two sites: https://imgur.com/a/nCKMEKE I repeated the experiment on my Galaxy Note 8 with its active pen, with sim…

you have a beautiful handwriting

Well thank you, you are very kind to say that.

I do have to confess my superpower though: the subtle smoothing that ziteboard.com and our friend irskep's browserboard.com apply. Without that, the writing would not be nearly as pleasant to look at.

Re: Witeboard

#59
Very cool product, please keep at it. Feedback: scrolling feels tedious. Please allow holding space key + mouse click and drag to move around the board (similar to how most design tools handle this).

Re: Witeboard

#60

I wrote "Hello World!" on witeboard.com using the active pen on my ThinkPad Yoga. It couldn't keep up with my writing and made a mess of it. Out of curiosity, I tried ziteboard.com (which came up in a search for "online whiteboard"), and it rendered my handwriting perfectly. Here are the results from the two sites: https://imgur.com/a/nCKMEKE I repeated the experiment on my Galaxy Note 8 with its active pen, with sim…

My first three tests of anything like this are:

1. Does it keep up with rapid movement? (If something fails this, it’s a total non-starter.)

2. Does the eraser on the back of my pen work? (If not, it’s very frustrating and a very bad sign.)

3. Does pressure sensitivity vary the thickness of lines? (I just find it’s a bad sign if something lacks this—tools that support pressure sensitivity seem to pretty consistently be far better than tools that don’t.)

Witeboard fails all three, badly. So no way am I ever going to use it.

Ziteboard is a bit better at #1 (though still not good), but fails #2 and #3 and has hideous latency and accuracy as well—it’s postprocessing strokes heavily, which makes sense for mouse but shouldn’t be done either at all or as much for a pen. So I’m not going to use Ziteboard either, it’s unpleasant to use.

Browserboard is the worst of the three: hideous latency, terrible accuracy, missing the start and end of each stroke, and fails all three.

I’m using Firefox on Windows on a Surface Book. I know much better is possible, because I wrote a simple, local, pressure-sensitive drawing tool some years back (in the early days of pointer events), and it worked just about as well as local apps like Microsoft Whiteboard or Krita or GIMP do. All three of these tools just seem to be making rookie errors like doing too much processing probably on the main thread, and skipping coalesced events. (Those are my guesses of the problems, as a developer that has dealt with this space.) None of them are good; Ziteboard is merely the least terrible.

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