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Excalidraw is pretty cool, but its main drawback is that is has no backend. The drawings cannot be persisted to the server, and you cannot collaborate with someone on a drawing unless you are both connected at the same time. I maintain another opensource whiteboard web application that has a slightly different set of features, but allows persisting drawings to the server. It's called WBO : - https://wbo.ophir.dev/
Does this support touch/stylus drawing?
> Excalidraw is a whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them In general, don’t whiteboard sketches have a hand-drawn feel? Seems like the trick would be a tool to give diagramming tools a hand-drawn whiteboard sketch feel, or take hand-drawn whiteboard sketches and give them a diagramming feel. Could be neat to put this engine behind e.g. graphviz/dot, for instance, a la…
Whiteboard sketches on a physical whiteboard do, but in general, computer “whiteboard” sketches are a mixed bag that IMO land more often on the side of straight lines and perfect circles, especially if you look around at which computer whiteboard products are commercially successful.
> Seems like the trick would be a tool to give diagramming tools a hand-draw whiteboard sketch feel, or take hand-drawn whiteboard sketches and give them a diagramming feel.
Here’s one example of the former: https://matplotlib.org/xkcd/examples/showcase/xkcd.html
The latter, converting sketches to diagrams, would be neat and is an interesting & difficult problem.
The thing that neither of these use-cases really cover is the need for a fast iteration / ideation tool in the exact same role as a physical whiteboard. Once you’re concerned about the presentation & look, the majority of time is spent working on the layout and the presentation because it takes longer to make it pretty than to just work out or communicate an idea without regard to beauty. Very small changes to where something goes or what it looks like can lead to a large and time-consuming ‘refactor’ of a diagram.
I love my Wacom and I love collaborative whiteboards, but it feels like neither is at its full potential.
I found the default font has the problematic side-effect that when shared through a zoom/google meet type platform, the 'handwriting' becomes illegible. This has annoyed me a lot at $company, which uses it widely.
Anyone knows if there is someting similar available, but for uploading and editing Screenshots ? I'd like to have features "crop", "pixelize" and "add sequential-number label" available in a brwoser-based picture editor.
Is there any API or method for pressure sensitive pens/tablets to work on the web? Or any native apps that support pressure and work with online apps? I love my Wacom and I love collaborative whiteboards, but it feels like neither is at its full potential.
No affiliation with Miro, just liked the service.
Excalidraw is pretty cool, but its main drawback is that is has no backend. The drawings cannot be persisted to the server, and you cannot collaborate with someone on a drawing unless you are both connected at the same time. I maintain another opensource whiteboard web application that has a slightly different set of features, but allows persisting drawings to the server. It's called WBO : - https://wbo.ophir.dev/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this support touch/stylus drawing?
Yes it does.
The code is open source and also purely front-end based. So the Excalidraw authors can see how it could be implemented. It's basically Bresenham's algorithm combined with the DOM API.
The code is at https://github.com/melvinroest/doodledocs/tree/master/app/co...
I wonder if there is a way to modify something like xfig to output in hand drawn "look".
Collaborative editing is of course also very good and tools like xfig don't have it.
I guess I'm wondering aloud if it makes sense to see "hand drawn look", collaborative editing and cloud storage/saas as orthogonal issues.