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Excalidraw whiteboard – easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel

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Re: Excalidraw whiteboard – easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel

#41
post #11

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/

Excalidraw can store the files, although it's a little hidden: the link option in export gives a link that downloads an encrypted JSON from their server.

Re: Excalidraw whiteboard – easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel

#43
post #28
post #11

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/

The public whiteboard is very interesting. It is a nice way to showcase collaborating capabilities. It would have been a great messy canvas except for that one user or bot determined to erase everything someone else draws :-)

A few of us managed to collaborate a bit... Not really going to change the world but it was fun while it lasted https://i.stack.imgur.com/rV8gQ.png

Re: Excalidraw whiteboard – easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel

#45
This is neat.

One bit of feedback: I found the default and even "extra bold" stroke size way to small. White boards have that imperfect broad strokes feel to them, having tiny lines, especially as the default just doesn't connect well with it IMO.

Otherwise the interface is very easy to use, I like the draggable and editable objects approach

Re: Excalidraw whiteboard – easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel

#46
Cool! I found it a little unintuitive that after each stroke, it reset to the pointer tool. I would've expected to be able to draw more lines without pressing 'X' each time.

Also, as a mathematician, I would love some Unicode support for greek letters and super/sub-scripts. Something similar to https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/unicode-input/. I tried to just draw the text I wanted but the first point I brought up made this more difficult.

ETA: If you hold 'X' or '7' then it remains in the tool you chose. This makes sense.

Re: Excalidraw whiteboard – easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel

#47
A few weeks ago excalidraw was using google for storage, see:

https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw-json/issues/76 "I also wonder, why is this using google cloud ? Could this be used without google cloud (and without sending data -- even if encrypted) to them ?"

I don't know if there is now a fully self-hosted version of excalidraw.

Re: Excalidraw whiteboard – easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel

#50

I really love this! My only complaint is having the brush reset to pointer after each stroke.

I also noticed that when I place text in the box, as I type the text expands out to the left and out of the box due to centering. My expectation was that the text would start from where my cursor is, and go to the right. (like in powerpoint or slides)
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