Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: A virtual whiteboard for working or teaching remotely

whiteboardfox.com

121–130 of 143 posts

Re: Show HN: A virtual whiteboard for working or teaching remotely

#122
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is another HTML5 / Canvas collaborative drawing app that I built which uses Google Drive for storage and thus runs completely locally. Works offline and runs in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, iOS, and Android and supports touch. http://thesavior.github.io/draw/

The one thing my wife (a math teacher) has always been craving is a video solution for these - that is, write equations or annotate a document on our android tablet while she narrates, then upload the video to YouTube. Last I checked there wasn't a good offering on the play store for this.

What app does Khan Academy use for precisely this?

Re: Show HN: A virtual whiteboard for working or teaching remotely

#124
Back in 2011, when I was starting with node.js I built something I called 'Writeboard' https://github.com/gtramontina/Writeboard . It's not an active project anymore, but I've considered resuming working on it. A rewrite of it is hosted in heroku, at http://writeboard2.herokuapp.com/ -- Check it out.

Re: Show HN: A virtual whiteboard for working or teaching remotely

#125

Back in 2011, when I was starting with node.js I built something I called 'Writeboard' https://github.com/gtramontina/Writeboard . It's not an active project anymore, but I've considered resuming working on it. A rewrite of it is hosted in heroku, at http://writeboard2.herokuapp.com/ -- Check it out.

Totally experimental, by the way...

Re: Show HN: A virtual whiteboard for working or teaching remotely

#126

I did something like this a few years ago, but we were forced to use flash- http://flockdraw.com

Why were you forced? html5 was around at the time (and in fact twiddla was launched two years before flockdraw).

Open the same Flockdraw URL in two side-by side windows and draw in one of them. Compare that to the WhiteboardFox video or Twiddla demo.

WhiteboardFox says a few seconds is "fast syncing". Flockdraw's sync is realtime (try it for yourself).

The kind of latency and overhead I wanted when building Flockdraw is only really feasible in JS when using WebSockets (which wasn't even fully standardized until 2011) but was doable in Flash in 2009.

Re: Show HN: A virtual whiteboard for working or teaching remotely

#127
post #2

This is little 'scratch-your-own-itch' project I started working on about 9 months ago. Front end is GWT, back end is Java servlets. Database was originally MySQL but switched to Prevayler for performance reasons. My YouTube video gives a nice overview of the benefits of a virtual whiteboard: http://youtu.be/MDEHFHG1l3Y What does Hacker News think?

One feature that would make this a killer app in my mind is the ability to import a photo of a whiteboard and have the virtual whiteboard reconstruct what was on the whiteboard in the future. We often take a picture of the whiteboard at the end of the discussion -- being able to continue to edit that whiteboard at some point in the future would be very handy.

Speaking of whiteboard photo-digitizing:

https://gist.github.com/lelandbatey/8677901

https://github.com/Flameeyes/unpaper

Re: Show HN: A virtual whiteboard for working or teaching remotely

#128
post #2

This is little 'scratch-your-own-itch' project I started working on about 9 months ago. Front end is GWT, back end is Java servlets. Database was originally MySQL but switched to Prevayler for performance reasons. My YouTube video gives a nice overview of the benefits of a virtual whiteboard: http://youtu.be/MDEHFHG1l3Y What does Hacker News think?

This is very cool. Do you think you could convert a cleaned up PDF or jpg from a service like unwhiteboard.com in to a virtual whiteboard?

Disclaimer: I made unwhiteboard.com

Re: Show HN: A virtual whiteboard for working or teaching remotely

#130
This tool was pretty responsive to draw with using a tablet, and I'm glad the pen width isn't very large.

I love using a Wacom tablet for drawing diagrams, and wish there was a good shared whiteboard tool that supported pen pressure.

I didn't know if this is possible at first, but a quick search revealed http://muro.deviantart.com/, which supports pen pressure using a plugin.

Any chance you might add that kind of flair to whiteboardfox?

Post reply on HN