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Comment by bouncingsoul | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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