Been doping this for over 20 years: purchase the raw material used for cheap shower walls. It is the same material used to make whiteboards. 20 years ago a "shower wall panel" was the size of an entire wall, 4 x 8 feet, for about $11. I just checked Home Depot, they are only $27 now. I just drill/screw them right to the wall. Best thing ever. I have several rooms with doodle walls.
Filling the Void of a Physical Whiteboard
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: Filling the Void of a Physical Whiteboard
#12Shameless plug: I’ve built https://board.new to help with ad-hoc collaborative whiteboarding. One thing I’ve found using more sophisticated tools was that folks spent too much time making it look nice vs discussing the content. Hence this tool that doesn’t distract with that. That said, mermaid looks pretty nice —- going to try that out for my design documents once settled on an approach.
Wow, I just tried it and absolutely love how you put the option to draw by holding shift instead of holding down a mouse/trackpad click. I've hated to draw on the trackpad because it has been so hard to click and draw at the same time.
Where did you get the idea for this? Do you know if a similar function exists in any other drawing application, like Illustrator/Photoshop/GIMP/Inkscape?
Re: Filling the Void of a Physical Whiteboard
#13In this space, I was really underwhelmed by Microsoft. I'm a fan of MS Teams, and feel like it works really well. Better than Zoom for the use case of a space for my smallish team, because of the tie-in with OneDrive, Powerpoint, etc. But, the whiteboard app is just so terrible. It feels like someone did an MVP and never gathered any feedback to improve it. It's essentially useless in it's current state.
Yes, the whiteboard app is terrible. If you are in that ecosystem though, you can draw directly in OneNote more effectively, and you can also embed diagrams there from any other place you are drawing - works ok.
Re: Filling the Void of a Physical Whiteboard
#14Shameless plug: I’ve built https://board.new to help with ad-hoc collaborative whiteboarding. One thing I’ve found using more sophisticated tools was that folks spent too much time making it look nice vs discussing the content. Hence this tool that doesn’t distract with that. That said, mermaid looks pretty nice —- going to try that out for my design documents once settled on an approach.
Nice! Would be better if one could,
a) scroll to increase canvas-space and
b) zoom out to step back a bit and take a look at the whole drawing.
Re: Filling the Void of a Physical Whiteboard
#15I feel like the OP's idea is not a bad approach for a tiny slice of what we do on a whiteboard.
All the tech solutions I've tried fall far short of a real board (or collaborating on paper). Drawing with a mouse is terrible, but buying my team tablets etc. for this had its own set of challenged. Software at least lets remote workers see the same "document" but it's a pretty mixed bag too. I've tried most of them and haven't found something that really shines (including the dedicated ones like miro).
Half the time we end up drawing on paper and sharing images of that, which is also not ideal.
Anyone come up with a really workable replacement?
Re: Filling the Void of a Physical Whiteboard
#16Good luck to anyone who wants to try to replace the whiteboard with any kind of screen technology. For me, nothing is even remotely close to be able to replace whiteboard, brown paper and marker pens. I'm not saying that the void doesn't exist, it's just that the void currently is too big and all solutions are nowhere near filling the void. With a whiteboard my experience is that everyone can pick up a pen and start…
We have an high tech whiteboard in the office I work.
And it is fine, it is always on, you can draw as soon as you pick the stylo, the UI is minimal to non existent, you just you can drag the screen left or right to get more screen estate and when you are done you can email the result to your inbox. I actually like it.
It is not significantly better than a whiteboard, but also not worse. It is probably 100x more expensive though.
Edit: it might be cheaper than having someone that make sure that working markers are always available which is a common failure mode of phisical whiteboard. How long this will last we will have to see.
Re: Filling the Void of a Physical Whiteboard
#17Shameless plug: I’ve built https://board.new to help with ad-hoc collaborative whiteboarding. One thing I’ve found using more sophisticated tools was that folks spent too much time making it look nice vs discussing the content. Hence this tool that doesn’t distract with that. That said, mermaid looks pretty nice —- going to try that out for my design documents once settled on an approach.
I love this. It's so easy to use and works great on a trackpad. I'm going to start using it in my meetings.
Nice job!
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EDIT: After playing with it for a bit, I have some feedback :)
- Sometimes, I accidentally press Z instead of shift, or vice versa. I would love to have undo! Backspace or delete hotkey would be perfect.
- For selecting colors, it would be great to just be able to press 1,2,3,4 (rather than cycling through).
- I often forget what color I have selected. Perhaps the cursor could be colored to indicate this?
- When typing text, my first instinct was to use the arrow keys to move the cursor around, but this doesn't work. Also, it's hard to select where the cursor should go to edit.
- The shift and Z hotkeys are great. But I don't quite understand selecting the tools. If I can just hold down Z to erase, why would I ever select the eraser tool? It seems like the most efficient approach is to only ever have the text tool selected, so that at any time I can click to create text, but otherwise I use Z/shift to draw.
Re: Filling the Void of a Physical Whiteboard
#18Shameless plug: I’ve built https://board.new to help with ad-hoc collaborative whiteboarding. One thing I’ve found using more sophisticated tools was that folks spent too much time making it look nice vs discussing the content. Hence this tool that doesn’t distract with that. That said, mermaid looks pretty nice —- going to try that out for my design documents once settled on an approach.
Oooh thanks for sharing. I really appreciate the simple keyboard layout, and that I can jump in without signup and sharing a link is very simple.
Re: Filling the Void of a Physical Whiteboard
#19In this space, I was really underwhelmed by Microsoft. I'm a fan of MS Teams, and feel like it works really well. Better than Zoom for the use case of a space for my smallish team, because of the tie-in with OneDrive, Powerpoint, etc. But, the whiteboard app is just so terrible. It feels like someone did an MVP and never gathered any feedback to improve it. It's essentially useless in it's current state.
Yes, the whiteboard app is terrible. If you are in that ecosystem though, you can draw directly in OneNote more effectively, and you can also embed diagrams there from any other place you are drawing - works ok.
I'll give that a go, thank you. It's just disappointing that MS couldn't even match Zoom's "annotate" functionality. Which is limited, but actually works.
Re: Filling the Void of a Physical Whiteboard
#20Shameless plug: I’ve built https://board.new to help with ad-hoc collaborative whiteboarding. One thing I’ve found using more sophisticated tools was that folks spent too much time making it look nice vs discussing the content. Hence this tool that doesn’t distract with that. That said, mermaid looks pretty nice —- going to try that out for my design documents once settled on an approach.
Wow, I just tried it and absolutely love how you put the option to draw by holding shift instead of holding down a mouse/trackpad click. I've hated to draw on the trackpad because it has been so hard to click and draw at the same time. Where did you get the idea for this? Do you know if a similar function exists in any other drawing application, like Illustrator/Photoshop/GIMP/Inkscape?
Ooo, solved my own problem.
MacOS has an option for "mouse keys" where one can toggle the keyboard to act as the directional control and click control for a mouse. So if I toggle it on, then I can use the "i" key to act as a mouse click and draw on the trackpad, and "m" key to hold a mouse click until I click "." to release it. And then I can toggle the mouse keys on/off by hitting the option key 5 times.
Woohoo!