Show HN: An open-source collaborative whiteboard | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An open-source collaborative whiteboard

wbo.openode.io

185 pointslovasoa40 comments

We have a few touchscreens in the office loaded with https://realtimeboard.com and https://awwapp.com/ in full screen. You can save your doodles straight to Google Drive. Works like a charm.

I think I created something similar with a slightly more moder UI, I have yet to add the network interface. https://drawo.sh, would you like to collaborate?

Where can I find the source code?

Hi, just set the repo as public https://github.com/francescogior/drawo

You know what would be _maybe_ a good idea? on macOS, when you use the default PDF viewer you can add signatures to documents. If you don't already have a signature, it lets you draw on the trackpad like it represents the screen, no need to click! just draw on it like it's a piece of paper and you have some ink at the tip of your finger.

What if you did the same thing, where the trackpad represents the entire whiteboard. Maybe it's too small, or maybe it would work perfectly :)

Interesting idea ! However, there is no "entire" whiteboard. The whiteboard is infinite, it grows as you draw.

Not sure you can get raw trackpad data like that on the web platform. Regular mouse input is relative and has pointer acceleration etc.

The 'touch' API doesn't give you that as far as I know.

This is awesome! I think the hand tool needs some work though. To me, it should be used to move specific shapes or text around rather than scroll the entire whiteboard. Also some way to select multiple objects and move them around would be great too.

This reminds me a little bit of both cursors.io [0] and Place [1] - Reddit's April Fools' social experiment in 2017.

[0] http://cursors.io/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_(Reddit)

This is actually a missing product! Good idea!

Thanks to Firefox Screenshots! A lovely tool...

https://screenshots.firefox.com/ECUMFOfbBYRRWexo/wbo.openode...

https://imgur.com/a/SWg25T1

These are great. Not sure if I am more impressed by some of the artwork or that it users actually let the artists create it without ruining it. All around a pretty neat project.

This is such a great idea!

I would use this as an annotation tool in meetings, particularly architectural diagrams and other complex information-rich image artefacts. I'm not sure if it has been mentioned yet but loading images would greatly add to its utility in meetings.

Have you given any thought to adding image loading?

This is cool.

http://prntscr.com/lo6038

heh you captured some of my scribbles in there ^^

There's a similar tutorial on YouTube on how to achieve this using sockets.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i6eP1Lw4gZk

Doesn't seem to work on mobile. Did anyone have better luck?

Amazing! Curious about whether you faced an issue with latency? What if two people are concurrently editing the same item on the whiteboard with high latency?

What do you mean by "the same item" ? You cannot really "edit" things other people drew. You can delete something as someone else is drawing it. Then it doesn't really matter if the other person continues drawing, the item will eventually be deleted.

If you start drawing with the pencil and your line is erased before you finish, a new line looks to be started, with different properties (black and a certain thickness).

I love this tool, especially on something with a stylus. Throw it up on a projector, connect with your device. Great for meetings

502 bad gateway

Sorry :) It's the hackernews effect. It's back online

Please add an eye dropper (the paint thing that matches the color you click on for the pencil)

Actually, this is already supported in firefox. The color picker in firefox has an eye dropper, and it works not only in the current page, but on your whole screen.

Nice. I just started / played / tied an impromptu game of tic-tac-toe with someone!

Hello, maybe it was me if the other person afterwards proposed to follow-up with a go game :)

Steve Jobs hates it. No one can use the whiteboard other than him.

link to source code?

https://github.com/lovasoa/whitebophir

Nice job, really nice tool.

this needs a livestream.

haha...agreed. Someone probably should set it up on twitch. Maybe competitive whiteboarding will soon be a thing.

I was pleasantly surprised to go to the public whiteboard and not immediately see it covered with phalluses.

"oh there's a public whiteboard, I wonder how long it'll be before... "

[page loads]

"... it's a new world record!"

You didn't scroll down far enough. I found one but deleted it.

The evolution is really quite fascinating. At first, the swastika and penis faction was losing since it is easier to erase than draw, but then they figured out that you could make the work of the clean up people harder by stippling their drawings, so the erase tool became less effective. In response, the erasers began to draw over the drawings and were quickly pushed back by the erase tool now used by the villains. Now it's almost balanced with both factions using the stipple technique.

It reminds me of the battles that take place in one of my drawing sites.

You can see the fight in action here (in the room one down and one right from the center, especially the first 30 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIJ3XFPRsSw (a lot of swastikas and penises so beware)

I'm glad that it's somewhat self-moderating but the vandals usually have the upper hand.

> I was pleasantly surprised to go to the public whiteboard and not immediately see it covered with phalluses.

Wikipedia had inclusionist vs deletionist ("this is strictly an online encyclopedia - most research programming languages are not notable - delete!") warfare, because the kludgy early Wikipedia infrastructure couldn't provide multiple views, so both communities couldn't be made happy.

HN is a stew of high-effort insight, and low-effort cruft, because it doesn't provide multiple views, so you can't toggle between expertise and chat.

A public whiteboard could be both without phalluses, and covered in them, toggled by preference. Image recognition, and user profiling, has gotten quite good. But for an absence of multiple views. Or... at least the arms race might become richer.

If user requirements are multimodal, and one's current UI, being monomodal, can't cope with that, well then...

too late.

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