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Show HN: a free multi-user whiteboard with unlimited, zoomable surface

sketchub.com

31–40 of 76 posts

Re: Show HN: a free multi-user whiteboard with unlimited, zoomable surface

#31

I work in a distributed office, and over the past few days I've been trying to find a "concept mapper", which helps us to make projects more concrete through flowcharts etc. The problem that I keep on facing is that the web apps which dominate the current market just don't cut my needs. They don't allow for proper exploration, and collaboration is a frustrating progress. We would gladly pay for a tool that doesn't ge…

great to hear! :-)

Re: Show HN: a free multi-user whiteboard with unlimited, zoomable surface

#33
The front ends seem to get desynchronised when two incompatible concurrent edits happen; this is a difficult issue to resolve, but one solution would be to change the data flow so local edits are drawn by the client on a transparent canvas, get sent to the server, and then get drawn on the underlying main canvas only when they are sent back from the server. The transparent canvas can be reset by the client at that point (you might need some synchronisation mechanism for this), so all users will end up having consistent state once edits have been processed by the server.

Re: Show HN: a free multi-user whiteboard with unlimited, zoomable surface

#34
post #32

Cool stuff! I've looked a bit at what it uses: shapes drawn are vectors, the app uses Raphael ( http://raphaeljs.com/ ) for drawing, and Pusher ( http://pusher.com/ ) for whiteboard syncing.

Regarding the Pusher web site, am I the only one who cannot resist the temptation of loading up Firebug to verify whether the counter is for real or "interpolated"?

Re: Show HN: a free multi-user whiteboard with unlimited, zoomable surface

#35
I would have liked the ability to change the line thickness, to work around you'd have to zoom out or in depending if you wanted a line thicker or thinner with the latter being particularly difficult as it's harder to keep track of where you are in relation to the rest of the page.

Re: Show HN: a free multi-user whiteboard with unlimited, zoomable surface

#37
Very cool. There are some minor issues though.

Here is my sketch: http://sketchub.com/view/d4b8fcb36fe4b078b100069bafebd352

I'm using a Thinkpad with Wacom enabled display and stylus. It 'should' say 'hello world' 3 times and have an underline after each one.

In the saved and view only link, it shows a 4th 'hello world' on the left and more slanted. It was erased before my real test.

It seems to miss certain strokes as you can tell by the sketch. Mainly straight lines. This might have been caught as trying to move the sketch area, but it did not move or register the line.

(As a control test to check display and stylus, I wrote the same text in OneNote and it was handled fine.)

Re: Show HN: a free multi-user whiteboard with unlimited, zoomable surface

#38
post #33

The front ends seem to get desynchronised when two incompatible concurrent edits happen; this is a difficult issue to resolve, but one solution would be to change the data flow so local edits are drawn by the client on a transparent canvas, get sent to the server, and then get drawn on the underlying main canvas only when they are sent back from the server. The transparent canvas can be reset by the client at that po…

This is what we do for http://300lin.es ;)

edit: My God, it's full of cocks.

Re: Show HN: a free multi-user whiteboard with unlimited, zoomable surface

#39
post #14

Infinite zooming is nice. How is it implemented? I would like it as a library.

The library is already out there, I open sourced it: https://github.com/florianguenther/zui53 (but it's very early beta, bad documented)

Cool, thanks!
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