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Witeboard

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Re: Witeboard

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as I put my pen to the surface and made a big sweeping movement, it popped up five or ten alerts in a row, all reading “please, draw slowly”, and broke (the socket disconnected and stayed disconnected). Um. When I drew things small, this didn’t happen, but it was as badly broken as Browserboard in that it wasn’t registering the first (and maybe last?) short time of each stroke, which makes it completely usele…

What is the best one you've come across?

No idea. I’ve never needed a collaborative whiteboard, and for non-collaborative use I haven’t found anything on the web anywhere near as good as the desktop options of Microsoft Whiteboard and Krita (though Krita has a definite learning curve), so on the odd occasions I want to share things with others I just do screen sharing of these. I started making one of my own a few years back and had the basic interactions down pat, but shelved that project before it ever got really good or could have supported collaboration. Mine was also bitmap-based rather than vector-based, which is a significant difference in approach in some regards, losing you some functionality but gaining you a lot of speed.

Re: Witeboard

#122

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…

Oh wow, ziteboard has a feature I’ve been looking for for ages: vector graphics rather that pixel graphics. You can zoom in indefinitely, making nested notes and annotations possible!

Re: Witeboard

#123
post #107

I miss uploading images and PDFs that I can "lock" and write on top. Ziteboard does it, but it is expensive and also when someone zooms everyone is zoomed, which kind of sucks. Jamboard is also bad at writing on background images. We do need a good whiteboard app with a simple share indeed for classes.

Shameless plug: AWW ( https://awwapp.com/ ) supports all of these and there's a free version.

Thanks! This seems to be the best solution for my needs.

Re: Witeboard

#124

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…

And it also needs voice and video to be useful.

Re: Witeboard

#125

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…

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

Sounds like I have some work to do. Not owning a pen-based device seems to be really hurting my ability to create a good experience here. I only own Windows, Mac, and iOS devices, and no tablet.

Thanks for trying it out, I really appreciate the notes.

> 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.

I promise Browserboard works really hard to get this right, though in JS it's not really possible to move things off the main thread. I wrote and maintain Literally Canvas, a fairly popular open source embedded drawing app, and dealt with some of these issues, but without owning hardware for testing it's really hard to cover the unknown unknowns.

Re: Witeboard

#126

I love that this exist, but the core problem with remote whiteboards is that everyone can write something legible when using a marker on a whiteboard, but it's way harder with a mouse/trackpad. It would be nice to have some features that made it easier - the features I really miss from apps I use to create diagrams are basic shapes like rectangles and the ability to select and move/resize/copy existing drawing. Witeb…

You can get a decent little drawing tablet for $30 these days. You'd probably spend half of that in the cost of pens over the device's lifetime. They're no longer ultra-expensive specialized equipment.

I do. I have an iPad and the Apple Pencil has made a huge difference for me, but I think its hard to expect everyone to have a device (even a cheap one) for that occasion when they want to contribute to the whiteboard.

Re: Witeboard

#127
I have tried to use various similar applications and the experience was overwhelmingly negative (due to limitations of mouse-based control). Thus, I'm considering getting an inexpensive graphics drawing tablet purely for ideation, note making, document annotation, and IT architectural diagramming (not for graphics design or digital painting!). A brief research narrowed down my choices to XP-Pen Deco 01 V2, Huion H610 Pro V2 and GAOMON M10K 2018 models (GAOMON and Huion are reported to be using the same [Huion's] driver).

One thing that I'd like to know is whether one of these models has any significant advantages versus the two others? For example, I suspect that a touch ring on GAOMON might be much easier / more natural / more reliable to use than two-button zoom design on Huion and even more so than assignable buttons on XP-Pen. Another - and much more important - question is security and privacy. My concern is whether these (or any other similar devices, for that matter) send any private user information to their manufacturers (would denying relevant firewall prompts be enough? if so, would that be a problem from the driver update and/or other functionality perspective?). Finally, I'm curious about potential differences between these models in terms of their support for non-mainstream applications, e.g., Miro and ArchiMate. I would appreciate sharing your thoughts on this.

Re: Witeboard

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are great insights. Have you found any online collaborative whiteboard tool that does what you want here? It is so frustrating compared to native apps where low latency, pressure sensitivity, and the pen eraser are table stakes.

More of an input for developers than actual suggestion but collaborative art boards like MagicalDraw[1] aren't new among digital artists and they're quite robust 1: https://draw.kuku.lu/index.php

> This is a non-supported browser.

> Your browser is not compatible with this site. Please try accessing the site from your Chrome browser.

That’s a new type of hard fail. That’s the first time I’ve had Firefox be rejected.

Re: Witeboard

#130
post #80

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…

Could you also give feedback on https://wbo.ophir.dev ? Contrarily to the other mentioned before, it is opensource [1], and you can easily host your own instance if you don't like the idea of sharing your whiteboards on a random server on the internet. [1] https://github.com/lovasoa/whitebophir

Woo this is my new favorite whiteboarding tool! I love how I don't have to log in and that it works with my ipad pencil
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