Ask YC: Feedback on early version of my startup, a digital whiteboard that doesn't suck | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Feedback on early version of my startup, a digital whiteboard that doesn't suck

dabbleboard.com

122 pointszhyder129 comments

I was frustrated by how annoying other options for digital whiteboarding were. Most cases I (and others I know) just fell back to using a physical whiteboard, or overusing words when a quick picture would do the job much better. In brief, I felt the existing apps out there didn't do enough to enhance our ability to communicate visually.

So I rethought what the UI should be to make it easier, faster and more natural to use. And here's the result. It's in Flash but is still relatively lightweight. I feel tempted to list out all the unique features, but I'd rather you give it a spin and let me know what you think.

You can see the video at: http://www.dabbleboard.com/main/video

Absolutely fantastic so far (all things considered)... can't wait for a permission structure so we can actually use this thing behind closed doors (virtually of course)!!

We have fought night and day with different products and solutions that just aren't flexible, require crappy proprietary software (eBeam), or too problematic and don't function as intended. And they all share a common trait as you've already called out: "just not natural enough".

Pay attention to your competitor's mistakes, just don't get too wrapped up chasing their tail. So many bad solutions right now. While you missed first to market, it doesn't matter -- just make it the best. Good luck! You certainly have my support and vote of confidence... I would be very interested in private beta.

ps. I could see this being a prime candidate for acquisition by Adobe for integration into Adobe Acrobat Connect, that is... if that don't rob you. :)

Thanks! By permission structure do you mean just being able to specify "can edit" versus "can view", or do you have something different in mind?

It'd be cool to have a secure group that can edit/see the whiteboard, for internal company meetings, etc..

Ok, that's an awesome collaborative whiteboard. Nice to propose a simple UI for it. Suggestions:

1. Manual save, on the toolbar. For the savaholics!

2. It's somewhat fast at refreshing, but have a dedicated Refresh button on the toolbar, not under the Share panel. If I'm working with some friends and they're all editing, I want to refresh it. Kind of like when you know Twhirl/any other desktop Twitter client is going to fetch new tweets automatically, but you still feel like refreshing.

2.1. Alternatively, let me move the Share Panel around. This could be an option you implement in conjunction with the above.

2.2. Alternatively, have a refresh button only when the document is shared.

3. When you save current document automatically, show it in the documents dock, just to give people reassurance, and to familiarize them with the UI.

4. Anglular (Z, etc) vectors turn into angles, not rectangles.

4.1. Freehand mode by default.

--EDIT--

5. I realize it's hard (with regard to the sharing and synchronization of the whiteboard shared users), and probably something to think about for the future, but uploading of images to use as objects would be extremely useful in, say, mocking up UIs collaboratively, or diagramming.

6. Maybe make the text feature more noticeable by making a text tool button on the toolbar. Most people will learn using the app by trying it, not by watching the video. (I didn't, at least.)

This is impressive. Great work with it, I will be definitely using it!

Wow that was amazingly fast feedback! Thanks!

1. Good idea, was considering that anyway as a way to reduce my database load, as opposed to saving every 4 seconds (if you change the drawing) which is what I'm currently doing. (I'm a hardware engineer and this is my first webapp: I just found out writes to the database are really really slow. Will explore memcached optimizations too.)

2. The intent of the refresh button is for when you're sharing the drawing with others (I initially wanted realtime refresh, but got worried about performance). Hence I put the button under the share panel. But I guess you're right, you would need to refresh more often than you'd need to see who else you're sharing with or to add people for sharing...

2.1 This should be trivial. Will do :).

3. (Not sure if you saw the video or already know this.) The pane on the left is the library pane (or "documents dock") that shows all your saved drawings. The idea is the current drawing is just like any other drawing in the library, just that it's got the focus for now. Or is this idea non-intuitive?

4. The issue is how often would you want to draw angular vectors, compared to rectangles. As an "optimization" for the UI, I allow users to draw a rectangle with just 2 sides rather than all 4 sides (which also works), because I expect them to be very common.

Thanks so much for the feedback! And I'm elated that you'd actually use it!

EDIT

5. You're the third person that asked for this feature, so now it's on my near-term to-do list. I don't think it's hard; just to eat the cost of the bandwidth and storage (which currently is very low).

6. Hmmm... I personally hate revisiting the toolbar each time I have to enter text, so I don't (yet) agree. This is on my "wait for more users to ask for this feature" list :).

1. I'd also expect that database writes are ridiculously slow when you're talking realish-time collaboration.

3. Got your point. I noticed that it was only pushing the current document to the documents pane when I was creating a new document. I'm used to the Google Docs approach - that is, if you make a new document and change it, it'll be in your documents, saved. Maybe, though, your approach may work better in this aspect.

4. Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's only a problem if you're a new user and are just messing around with it, the real usage of angular vectors is probably very little :)

No problem - best of luck!

EDIT -

6. That's true - definitely agree with you there.

6. I jumped right in without watching the video, and I got pretty frustrated when I wanted to type text and didn't see a toolbar option. I didn't even think about just typing. I do think you should add it, then "power users" will figure out that you can just start typing.

It might be funny and intuitive to put a text button on the toolbar and when it's clicked display a large hint on-screen saying something like:

"You can add text anywhere just by clicking and start to type. So no need for this pesky button!"

And then fade the text button away or even better destroy it with an explosion animation and then keep track of it in the session/user login.

I actually got how to use the text straight away - Please don't change that to force people to use the tool bar to put it into text mode - that would be very frustrating!

I think that it should stay in the auto-shape mode by default. Its really the killer feature of your product and I'd keep it that way.

If you added a sick & quick way to do circuit diagrams, a lot of EE students would love you. They might not pay a lot for it, but you'd get their mindshare. * I know the shared library feature is for that. Somebody would make a bunch of circuit elements and I could use them. For circuits, thinner lines would be necessary (or less fuzzy lines at least).

Thanks! As a EE myself, the ideal feature for circuit diagrams would be "auto right-angle route and connect" (hope that made sense). Visio/Omnigraffle have this. I wonder how many non-EEs (or non-techies) would need that.

mocking up UIs collaboratively

sounds cool, especially if it's live

Startup? 15 years ago apps like this would be a nice weekend projects we'd do for fun or (mostly) to impress each other in high school: doing it under DOS using x86 assembly mixed up with some Pascal was comparable to JavaScript's capabilities of modern day.

In 2008 it's a "startup". Nicely done.

Why would this be any less viable than Zenter or Writely?

I didn't said it was. I just find it funny how history repeats itself: when I was a kid, doing something like this was a fun challenge, since most computers worked in text mode 80x25 characters, and after a while an application like that became trivial and boring to write (since about Windows 3.0 on PC).

But fast-forward 10 years and thanks to advances in technology - bam! It's hard again :)

Sure it's no more than a weekend project (though it took me a LOTT longer than that). If a weekend project has the potential to add value to the lives of many users -which I'm hoping for-, I'd call it a startup.

Here's my attempt (I wrote this 8 years ago and the code has rotted) http://chat.axod.net/draw Still works though, realtime multi-user drawing. Java applets eh hehe

1. I was surprised when all my drawings turned into squares. Freehand mode should probably be the default since that's what most people will expect from a whiteboard.

2. You don't recognize triangles.

3. Instead of having two modes, could you just have freehand mode with shape buttons in the toolbar? I say this because the shape recognition didn't work that well and I ended up needing to customize the shapes anyway.

4. You should mark where the last click was. I moved my mouse after clicking and had no idea where the text would show up.

Thanks for the feedback!

1. Hmm... I'm not sure of that. That's definitely what users expect of bad whiteboards like MS Paint, the one in Netmeeting, etc. I think most whiteboarding involves drawing block diagrams and such (or maybe that's just the engineer in me talking). Could you share what types of drawings you typically do?

2. This is planned.

3. Well I need to improve my shape recognition algorithm then. One of the key features IMO that makes this more natural to use is that you don't have to keep revisiting the toolbar (you can do a lot by never visiting it). Could you elaborate a bit on what shapes you were trying to draw, and what they ended up into, so I know what to fix in my shape recognition algo?

4. Good idea. I should do that.

Just first impressions:

I had the same thing on #1, just assumed I could draw freeform first.I didn't expect it to take my freehand and make it into a line or circle.

I'm not sure that's a "bad" thing, because people figure it out pretty quickly. Made me hesitate at first, though, because I thought maybe there was no freeform drawing at all which turned me off. Might be more intuitive if you lit up the Freeform button with a speech bubble when they draw their first item and it autoshapes for them. Or maybe turn the cursor or somesuch into something that indicated we were drawing shapes.

Looks pretty slick. Good work.

I liked it:

3. I hope that when you update the algorithm you will include ovals/others shapes that can be drawn at a tilt. (or maybe tilted later on demand?)

Whenever I tried to draw tilted ovals they un-tilted and became really big.

PS This is one of the best Ask YC posts I've seen so far. Everybody likes helping in this kind of discussion--its also obvious that you value every bit of feedback.

Thanks! I'm not sure I'd be able to update the algorithm to automatically detect tilt. That would probably have to be a tool you use after drawing (like the "group" button).

I'm curious, what types of drawing would you need tilt/skew in?

I am not sure, I was simply fooling around with it and noticed that the tilt/skew for ellipses had not been added.

Neat app! Along with triangles, pick up sine waves.

So much great feedback here. Thanks all! These Qs may get drowned in the comments, but I'll try anyway:

- Do you think anything here is patentable? I hate patent trolls as much as anyone else, and I do wish legislation eventually disallows (most or all) software and UI patents. And I know patents don't make consumer websites, happy users do. And I know it's a distraction to file the paperwork. But just curious...

- For the free version (what you currently see), should the "Make Public" be default, with opt-out? Pros: users will have a great pool of drawings to copy from; could also evolve into a great community. Cons: users' privacy compromised, especially if they don't realize it's being made public. (To try to avoid the latter, I'd mention it during sign up, but that may not be enough.)

- My previous startup's experience with patents was: if you want to, you can write a patent that weaves around areas covered by other patents. So, with enough effort, the answer is yes.

- Please don't do this: gliffy does does for the free version, and it's really annoying. If you want, make it so that a popup comes up and makes you choose whether it should be public or not, or just leave it opt-in.

Nice job! I made a related project when I first began web programming and javascript about 2 years ago, though I've since mostly abandoned it (http://boxily.com) -- it's only javascript so I couldn't do all the neat flash things you do here.

I'm with you though, most digital whiteboards do suck, and everyone seems to try to do one :)

A couple features that would be cool:

1. SVG export? Maybe not in high demand, but the engineer in me loves vector graphics. 2. Line thickness? Something to think about. 3. I like what crescendo mentioned as well.

Good luck! -Justin

1. svg export would be easier than visio export, but has less market value. So overall I don't know which to do first :).

2. There's just 2 thicknesses supported so far. How much more control do you think you'd need (3 levels?, 4 levels?)? I'm intentionally limiting your options so you don't have to waste time trying to decide what thickness line to choose. We don't have this problem with a real whiteboard :). (Plus it keeps the toolbar simple and uncluttered.)

This is pretty neat. A few feature suggestions:

1) Constrain aspect ratio on resize when holding down a control key.

2) I really like the way it guesses that you're trying to draw a circle when your freehand is sufficiently curved. A neat addition to this would be bezier spline interpolation for smooth curves if it's clear that the user isn't drawing a closed loop.

3) Import existing image as shape.

4) Shapes library (for things like ER diagrams, UML, etc...)

Thanks for the feedback!

1) This is planned. Will also snap to grid when moving objects.

2) I want to do this. But as I said in another comment, I just need to figure out the UI for enabling the user to change the curvature of the line.

3) You're now the fourth person that asked for this :). It's definitely on my to-do list now.

4) I'm hoping the community will produce this. Anyone can do "Share -> Make Public" and then the drawings will show up in the Public Library. You can then copy anyone else's drawing into your own personal library. (I do plan to add better functionality for searching/tagging items in the public library eventually. It just didn't matter yet coz no one has anything there so far.)

it would be very cool to have real time sharing -- or a few seconds behind -- so that it could be used during a phone call for collaborative brainstorming...

Thanks. It does have this, the "few seconds behind" version :), though you have to click a button (Share -> Refresh) to refresh the drawing. Try using the "Share" functionality with a friend after signing up.

I really really want to be able to use this without signing up. I just need a link to give a friend so they can spontaneously collaborate with me. The diagram doesn't need to persist past that session, so long as we can both save a png. The spontaneity and ease of use is a killer feature for me.

Excellent! I've been looking for one of those for ages.

Only problem I found so far:

I started a drawing, clicked sign up to share it and it was gone.

Good point. I should fix that. Thanks!

I like it. If I were you, I'd give it Visio features and sell it for $10/50 diagrams/month to small/medium companies.

Thanks! I was thinking of a similar pricing plan. I worried that companies wouldn't be comfortable with the security issues of having their drawings on my servers though. Any tips on what I could do to make the service secure, and to make them trust me?

Btw, just like Basecamp is the anti-Project, I'd like to think of Dabbleboard as the anti-Visio (or anti-Netmeeting-whiteboard) :).

Make sure the logo is professional looking! I am only half kidding.

But apart from that, why not just go ahead and try pitching it to them as it is? There's tons of value in here even without adding security. If you later figure out that security issues make or break the deal, then you can revisit this issue (or keep working on it in parallel.)

I could give you a million things you could do to really improve the security of your service, but the reality is there are a couple of superficial things you can do right now that will get you over the marketing hump on security:

* Deliver all content over HTTPS.

* Have big long random strings of hex characters in the URLs.

Yeah I should do the https thing. At least makes the transfer secure.

I already do a bit of random strings. Try sharing a drawing, the link it produces includes a 16character code that must match for the sharee to be able to access the drawing.

It doesn't really add any meaningful security. The real security issues with your app are going to be in your code, not on the wire. But it's a strong psychological signal.

It's the same with the random IDs. Generate UUIDs with SHA1 or something, and make them show up in the URL bar. The signal is, "there's no simple integer counter here where if I incr it, I get some other customer's data".

Or allow diagram creation and saving on the site for free and charge a fee for downloading a PDF/visio format of the diagram.

EDIT: PS Very cool.

Thanks! Btw, you can currently download a .png format for free, which I hope you'll be able to print with any program on your computer, or convert to pdf. Do you think there's value in doing a direct conversion to pdf?

Converting to Visio though probably will be a nightmare coz of MS's ugly proprietary format. Just coz of the complexity of doing this, in spite of its value, it'll probably be lower on my priority list.

Btw, currently this goes a little more head-to-head with whiteboarding apps like Netmeeting or Webex's whiteboards (or even MSN messenger's built in whiteboard), and less with tools like Visio/Omnigraffle, that have to be much more sophisticated and give users much more control to make pretty diagrams.

You might be surprised. There are multiple 3p apps that can edit and save Visio. The brand value of collaborative online Visio diagrams for businesses might be pretty large.

My hunch is that a lot of business users wouldn't know what to do with a PNG, but they would know how to open, print, and redistribute a PDF. (PNG support is built into Windows, but my guess is that most non-technical users don't know that.)

Why not have "Save as image" and "Save as PDF" to make things less confusing for users?

You can also upsell various built-in templates/drawings (finance, coding, etc.).

Add sub-accounts if you target SMBs.

Awesome. My suggestions:

1) You need a "snap to platonic" type option. I have too many ovals that I wanted to be circles, and too many rectangles I wanted to be squares.

2) Need a "shift" resize functionality, so that it changes scale but not the 'aspect ratio'.

3) Need the ability to resize text by click+dragging.

4) The border of an 'object' is useful for knowing what's going to be affected by my action, but it really should 'do' something, too. Based on my UI experience, I've been trained to think I can click on the border and move whatever I just clicked on. Instead, I kept drawing lines.

5) Could use a "select all" function.

6) If I select an object then click a new color box, it should change the color of the selected object. Or I should be able to "drag" a color onto an object (or both!) to change it.

A few "brilliant" points:

1) I love that you 'save' the pages I've made, and I -absolutely love- that they function as objects that can be used on a new page.

2) Thank you for letting me get "back inside" a text box I've already created.

3) It's -fast-.

Thanks!

1) Coming soon.

2) Could be done, but I'm not sure how useful it is for whiteboarding. (It is with photos though.)

3) Not sure about this either: you'd inadvertently end up with an ugly drawing with too many font sizes... and you'd have to spend time to make them the same size.

4) Right now the only thing the border tells you is what you'll end up selecting if you click. The issue is selection vs drawing disambiguation (described in some other commments).

5) How about a hotkey "CTRL-A" instead?

6) Coming soon.

This is good, you should submit to Techcrunch after iterating based on feedback.

I haven't used the other ones much but they always seemed a lot slower then drawing on paper. This does seem super easy. I like it. congrats.

I have two suggestions for text labels:

1. Make the click location the center of the label, both horizontally and vertically. If I want to place a label in the middle of an object it's more convenient if I don't have to estimate in my head the length of what I'll type and thus where to click. I know I could reposition the label manually as a second step but why not making it easy to get it right in the first place?

Maybe have a toggle button so you can switch to left-justified but make centered the default.

2. If I reposition a shape with a label in it the system should heuristically guess that I mean to move the label with it. Right now if I make a shape with a label in it and move the shape moves but the text doesn't, that's silly. I realize it could be nontrivial to guess what shape a label is "on" if it's at the intersection of multiple shapes but at least do it in the simpler cases.

Great idea and great implementation.

A few suggestions:

- fast (or almost) autosaving/updating so that it can be easily used on a phone call for collaborative brainstorming w/o having to click save all the time.

- add meta keywords or other text on the page so that google indexes the text content (added via the text tool)

- Add bottom tabs like excel does for sheets to make a sequence of whiteboards possible -- of related stuff.

- full screen mode

- let users create libraries of shapes that do cool/useful things

- integration with that guy's technology that uses wiimote IR receiver to let the user draw with an infrared LED as a light pen. Projector projects the dabbleboard onto the wall, I draw with light pen.

- the ability to zoom way in/out and scroll (maybe i want my dabble board to be 30 feet wide..

Thanks!

1. I'm worried about database load. I'll have to do some intelligent memcaching etc. (haven't thought this thru yet) to make that a possibility.

2. Yep I've thought of that, tho I'm a little worried it might creep people out. (It's not as awesome as Gmail to get away with it.) That's one possible way of monetization, the other being the freemium model. But right now I just want to get some users, get the features right.

3. Hmmm... the library pane on the left kinda does that. Would you want it to work in a different way?

4. Sure. But I don't want to resize the canvas for UI reasons (see another of my comments on window resizing).

5. You can already create a library of shapes (the left pane). Did you mean something different?

6. I absolutely want to do something like that. But I've dreamed up a very different -and I think better- implementation. To build and sell a real physical product like that I'll need quite a bit of funding. PG, you there? :)

7. Yeah I was hoping to avoid that (see 4. above). Coz I hate having to constantly zoom in/out and pan around just to draw. But it may be needed if the current canvas just isn't big enough :(.

Excellent. My apologies for not knowing about some existing features...

Very nice. Some small comments (my apologies if some of these are there already and I just didn't notice):

1. Tooltips or a statusbar at the bottom which tell you what a button does when you mouse-over it.

2. Some visual differentiation between normal buttons (new, download, etc.) and toggle buttons (freehand, arrow mode, etc.)

3. Proportional resizing with shift or control (as others have mentioned)

4. Easier way to multiple-select objects rather than shift-clicking each one

5. Snapping between different objects (perhaps toggleable) and/or a grid

6. What software did you use for creating the demo screencast? It looks good (and I might need to record a screencast for my startup soon...)

Thanks!

1. You're referring to the move/replicate/scale/delete handles, right? I could probably add that.

2. The visual differentiation so far is that the toggle buttons are clumped together. There's one "bug" though: the top and bottom edges of a group should be straight lines. (I actually have a good reason for this bug :).)

3. You mean resizing in quantized amounts (e.g. 10pixels) rather than continuously right? If yes, this is planned.

4. Yeah this can be annoying, and I don't have a good solution for this yet (I'm reluctant to add a "select" button in the toolbar like all other drawing apps). But I'm hoping you don't have to do this often since you can use "Group" functionality.

5. Snap to grid is planned.

6. I used iShowU on the Mac and uploaded to Viddler (thank God they eat the BW cost for nothing in return). When you embed your Viddler video, make sure to select the same resolution as your original capture; scaling it will ruin it. I used the built-in mic on my MBP, so the audio sucks; will invest in a better mic soon.

Fantastic - I have been looking for something like that for ages that just works.

I even posted in a thread on there that a 'usable whiteboard' was one of those problems that still needed solving - I reckon you are a long way there - well done.

1) Said before...Image upload into drawings would be nice 2) Adding clickable URLs in the text would also be nice 3) Different download option types, especially SVG, would be helpful so that it can be sent to people with Visio 4) Did not recognize a diamond shape, I use that all the time for flowcharts 5) Easier way to create lines that connect shapes. Again, i do this all the time when creating flow charts and it is sort of a pain to have to click the arrow icon. Maybe if I was using the right mouse button???

Overall very nice, I will probably use again.

This is pretty awesome! Very usable, not too many features but the ones you really need and they work really well. I can totally see this maximized on a virtual whiteboard too.

It would be pretty cool to have access to apps like this for integration with 3rd party sites. Even if they left the original site and went to yours but saved back to where they came from, that would be very useful. I know www.snipshot.com does exactly that for image editing and it works well. Perhaps that could be a paid service idea... :)

Thanks! That's an interesting feature, hadn't thought of that. At first thought, I actually don't think it'd be technically too difficult either, just need to make a clean API.

Very cool, seriously impressive. I love the simplicity of the resize, copy, delete, and move handles.

My only quibble- something has to be done about the logo.

I get what you're trying to do... make the logo look like it was designed with the whiteboard itself. Not a bad idea, but I think you should use it more abstractly, like the logo is inspired by the idea of a handwritten writeboard (not quite so literal).

The thin black lines with fat blue outlines is a little funky.

All around though, great work.

"look like".

It was actually made with Dabbleboard itself (except for the word "BETA"). I had the general idea for the logo, and I thought to myself "which is the easiest app for me to make the logo in... oh wait".

It's just a placeholder for now, and will get replaced eventually.

Not bad. Why everything I draw must be a circle, square or line. Sometimes i need a curvy line, or a angled one. Don't force everything. Need shapes. More of them. Visio is a pretty decent tool, (Omnigraffe for macs is good too), try to copy some features they have, but make them a simpler as possible.

Then allow me to export it in different formats, Visio being one of them, as it seems it is the tool used the most.

Thanks! Other shapes are planned: diamonds and triangles for sure. I want curved lines but haven't figured out the UI for them yet (I'd need an additional handle compared to straight lines, to allow the user to change the control point and hence the curvature.)

Yep Visio and Omnigraffle are definitely the heavyweights of drawing. They have lots more features; which in particular do you think are most important? (I think even stuff like solid/gradient shapes & shadows are superfluous, but I'm just one user :)).

shadows are useful. just make your block-shapes have a shadow by default (like omnigraffle) and it completely changes how smooth and professional even the simplest of diagrams look.

Sure, I could consider a default shadow. But I'm reluctant to clutter the UI by giving the user a gazillion options for shadows, none of which help you communicate your ideas any better.

I like it (though I can't say I have much use for a digital whiteboard). It would be nice if it would automatically resize to your window size, though; the bottom is just under the bottom of my window and scrolling just for that little bit that isn't really necessary is annoying. Perhaps this could include a button to extend the space if necessary (perhaps only inside the box, too, rather than extending the whole page).

Thanks! I have a UI problem with resizing. If you have to see a drawing made by a friend who used a bigger window, you'd see a truncated drawing. The obvious solution here is to have canvas you can zoom-in/zoom-out of, AND allow horizontal/vertical panning (like Google Maps). I think that would clutter the UI and make using it annoying.

So I decided to support only the size that I felt would fit in 95% of browser windows. The Dabbleboard drawing+drawing_toolbar+drawing_title fit exactly in a 1024x768 window with the browser's address bar, bookmarks bar, and tab bar all enabled.

I would dearly like to be able to create links between objects, which follow when I move the objects around. I've tried about a jillion whiteboard/flowchart type apps and none of them do this, but yours could!

This is because I often find myself trying to mock up a graph of some sort and not know where the objects are supposed to go when I'm drawing them, and then it's impossible to later move them around.

That could be useful I guess. Any other users here want/need this?

I could absolutely use such a feature.

Hey zhyder, this is great! And if you want to make money, here is the perfect thing to add for paying users: dimensions! Artists could easily use this to layout art on a wall! Let them set the width of the wall, and the size of paintings, etc., and then let they lay them out on the wall, and give them the dimensions! My girlfriend could start using this today if it had that, and we'd gladly pay for it!

Very nice.

Couple of ideas: * It would be nice if freehand mode used some criteria to separate "changing direction" from "wobbling a bit" in order to straighten out edges, so I could use it to draw a perfect triangle.

* It would be nice if entering text used some sort of edge detection to automatically fit text into a box/circle/etc.

Your circle-detection code is a bit overzealous. I put it in arrow mode and tried to draw a bunch of arrows from one side of the canvas to the other, and if my lines were even a little bit curved, it turned them into ovals. It should really only turn it into an oval if the user has changed direction substantially during the drawing.

Yes, the problem is that I don't support curved lines yet. (Do let me know if you intended it to be a straight line and the algo still messed up.) Sounds like everyone wants curved lines, so back to the drawing board -ahem dabbleboard-. Will definitely find a way to add it.

You know it's probably just me but I couldn't draw a thing. It loads and I can play with the start whiteboard, but I can't add anything new or draw anything. I'm running Max OS X 10.5.3 and using Firefox 3 RC1.

I blame Adobe though, not your program.

Just thought you should know... your app caused a crowd in my cubicle when someone walked by and saw me playing with it. They asked what I was doing and I told them what it was and everyone had a "damn, thats cool!" feeling about it.

nice job!

Awesome, thanks for spreading the word!

Agree with most of the other comments, especially around uploading images / objects as a base.

I've used www.vyew.com a few times as a guest - the other super feature they have which you might consider is inbuilt VoIP.

Great effort!

I would let skype do the VoIP, or hidefconferencing, or freeconference: it will be enough work to continue to evolve the whiteboard features.

The problem is that no one is going to remember your site when they actually need a whiteboard or share it with their friends. To fix that, give it a purpose instead of leaving it as a blank canvas for people to use. For example, you could use the whiteboard as the basis for a iSketch (http://isketch.net) ripoff, while making it clear that people can use the whiteboard on its own. People will use it and share it with their friends and you'll end up with more users for your core product. There are plenty of other ways to achieve the same goal.

The downside is that whatever you come up with to get users may suck away too much time and effort from improving the product itself. You can always outsource the building of such add-ons by providing an API and directing users to your site that way.

Ability to change zoom level would be a plus, and then making the size of the whiteboard conform to the size of the window (the whiteboard doesn't fit in a browser window at 1024*768; not essential but annoying).

I was hoping it would fit in 1024x768. How many toolbars does your browser have enabled (in addition to the address+tab bars)?

OS X menu bar, Safari with address+tab & bookmarks bar, OS X dock.

I have flashblock installed (Firefox 2), and when the site first loads up the flash box is offscreen on the right. I had to scroll to the right, press "play", and then the box went to the right location.

Wow, looks like you hit a nerve here (in a good way)! I hope you have a clear vision of where you want to take this, because the users will pull you every which way, as far as user requests :~).

This is cool. I was able to figure it out in about 30 seconds. The text is a bit off... I assumed that there should be a toolbar button. Maybe it would just give you instructions...

"The text is a bit off... I assumed that there should be a toolbar button. Maybe it would just give you instructions..."

Sorry for being dumb, but I didn't follow. Could you clarify? Thanks a lot!

I didn't realize I should click and type. Instead I looked for a toolbar button. But once a figured out how to do it (by reading another comment, actually), I really liked it.

To accommodate that style of learning, you could have a 'text' button in the toolbar whose only purpose is to give the user a message stating that they need to simply click and type.

I'm trying to solve this problem by loading my default drawing (which loads when you aren't signed in), the one with all the instructions. I should make the instruction for how to enter text ("Click anywhere and start typing to enter text") more visible I guess.

Had I read it I would have seen this, I suppose. But frequently users just don't read the text.

You could put a picture of yourself in the about section to build a personal connection with the first users.

Edit: There's also a typo (harware)

Oops, thanks for pointing that out.

This is really cool. If you incorporate collaboration functionality it could also be very useful for presentations or online meetings.

There is collaboration functionality already. Click the "Share" button on the top-right. It's not truly real-time yet though. (You either share offline, or if working online together, you have to hit the annoying refresh button).

I need to figure out long-polling/Comet and see if I can make true real-time work.

Here's a feature request: allow users to embed a given drawing into blogs, etc. That would be a killer feature, imo.

Request granted :).

You can already do that, altho I need to make it more obvious. Click Share -> Make Public. Now you have a public webpage you can link to, and you can directly embed the image in blogs too. (The latter part is non-obvious but you'll discover if you check source :)... tonite I'll fix this so that the public link reflects this option explicitly).

Awesome! One more request: let the power users get a little button they can put on their sites (say, right above a rich text area) that, when clicked, brings up an empty border in a javascript pseudo-popup. After creating the drawing, it would automatically be included in the text field (or something to that effect). Sorry if I'm not clear on what I mean...

EDIT: I think Lux explained it a bit better in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202849

Very nice! Can collaberation happen in real time? So you just see what's happening without having to click refresh?

Might be cool, but as it is Flash, I won't be using it.

Could this be done reasonably with Javascript et al?

Javascript's ability to do graphics is very limited; you have to do hacky 1pixel divs, and you still won't get pretty anti-aliasing.

Even if I had infinite time to write the code in JS, I'd have to replicate a lot of functionality of the Flash player, and you'd end up with maybe 5x the code you'd have to download compared to the Flash swf file. Doubt you'd prefer that experience.

I think most people hate Flash coz its: (i) obtrusive as ads on sites, and (ii) it takes too much goddamn CPU (or at least that's why I hate it on my Mac). But I've paid close attention to the CPU usage in Dabbleboard; let me know how it runs for you.

I don't hate it, it's just that Adobe's Linux implementation of Flash is very bad.

Yes, the Mac version could be better too. I'm curious if you're seeing issues with Dabbleboard in particular. If not you could still un-adblock (or un-flashblock) it :).

> Javascript's ability to do graphics is very limited; you have to do hacky 1pixel divs

There's <canvas/>. It can even be used with IE these days: http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/

There should be some way to work on the whiteboard with other people simultaneously. I need that.

It's there, but you need to sign up for that. After signing up, click "Share".

Check out sketchfu.com. Similar technology, but geared to a slightly different audience.

One of the first YC startups did exactly this. I'm not sure what happened to it.

http://www.thinkature.com/ ?

Yes! Thank you.

this is incredibly slick. i love how easy it feels. one major problem i faced -- once an object is selected, i thought dragging would move it, but of course it doesn't. That created a bunch of unneeded shapes for me.

Yeah I'm in two minds about that. The problem arises coz of my "optimization" where I automatically figure out whether you want to: 1. Select: click without dragging. 2. Draw: click while dragging.

All other drawing apps have separate tools in the toolbar for select and draw (and even more for square/circle/text... yeesh). And I want to minimize your visits to the toolbar.

If I made it drag instead of draw in your example, then I'd need a "select" tool again :(.

Or I could choose the middle ground: if an object is already selected (i.e. not just being hovered over), then I do a move instead of a draw. Would this help?

Indeed, that would fix it for me very cleanly for me, at least.

Any other users prefer this "middle ground" of selection versus drawing disambiguation? :) I can add it right easily enough.

Yes. On first thought, at least, this seems like exactly the right way to do it.

Very nice job, by the way. It might be the first "critique my startup" post I've seen here where I took a look and (a) it made sense, and (b) didn't suck. Actually, it's a lot better than not sucking; it's fast and immediately usable and generally feels better than average.

Edit: the name dabbleboard is sort of crowded by dabble.com and dabbledb.com, though. My first thought was that it was an offshoot of one of these.

Not needing to change modes is a fantastic feature. Hang on to it.

I like it. Get a Favicon. I bookmark all my sites using those images.

It was EXTREMELY painful just drawing simple stuff because the "free transform" resizer would pop up after every segment drawn. Make this optional.

Also, don't even make people sign up. Not right now. Later.

If by "free transform resizer" you're referring to the green move/scale/etc. circles, then that shouldn't happen. They're supposed to only come up when you click on an object, not right after drawing each shape.

If that's happening it must be a bug somewhere in my code. I'll try to replicate it. Thanks!

locked up my browser... os x 10.3.9 on firefox 2.0.0.14

Sorry about that. I've heard one or two other instances. So much for the Flash player being consistent :(.

I have 10.5.2 and the same version of Firefox. I don't have a way to debug this right now (can only afford one mac), but I'll try to replicate the hang in other browsers.

awesome, when i click freehand and arrow, it uses the freehand.

how do i add more image assets on the left?

Just drag your selection to the pane on the left.

Simple crop feature would be awesome

Ctrl-Z for undo would be great

Already works, try it :)

Very nice. One thing that seems to have gone un-noticed till now: LaTeX support would be nice.

Secondly, the UI right now is very sparse and that is a great thing. Make sure that extra features don't clutter it up.

Other than that, great app.

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