Working remotely: I want my shared whiteboard

I had the insightful realisation a few years ago that I can't think without a marker in my hand, but almost no-one else benefits from my boxes-and-arrows. And it's rare that anyone grabs the marker from me and joins in.

So I switched to using a notebook. I buy big Visual Diaries in lovely thick cartridge paper that begs to be scribbled on. I carry a set of B, HB and 2B pencils, a decent eraser, and a pencil sharpener. And I scribble during meetings and when rubber-ducking.

Very occasionally I'll show someone else my scribbles. Even more occasionally, seeing the scribbles will help them understand wtf I'm trying to say.

But mostly it just helps me keep up with my intuition.

I use Microsoft Whiteboard, it works pretty well. One thing I like is you can put it on a big screen that supports Whiteboard, and also work from a browser or device and it all syncs in realtime, with multiple participants. And it's standalone so you don't have to be in a conferencing tool to use it.

I don't work for Microsoft, but just like Whiteboard.

I'd settle for a good shared whiteboard, but the gold standard is still Hiroshi Ishii's Clearboard:

http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/clearboard/

It is one of those simple, elegant ideas that can't really escape the lab due to hardware limitations.

Until we have transparent OLED displays or 3D cameras that extend their field of view all the way to the screen surface, it will be nearly impossible for common people to have an interface similar to that

My team is 100% remote and we work with other teams that aren't. We use Google's Jamboard. All members of my team have iPads and 'pencils' and there is a dedicated app, and our conference rooms have special Jamboard devices mounted on our walls. It can be used from a browser too. They all work pretty seamlessly together. I don't work for google but I like Jamboard.

There's also https://jamboard.google.com/ (until they sunset it)

There's the (kinda expensive) physical version where you can actually draw on the screen itself, but you can also do it for free on a normal computer.

As an academic, I often need a whiteboard during video conferencing calls (for writing math and sketching diagrams). I tried many solutions with a mouse, touch screen, iPad, tablet. It turns out, nothing beats good old whiteboard. I've bought a small whiteboard which I keep in my office behind my chair. If during a call I need to use it I pull it into the camera view and use markers to draw on it.

To me this highlights how backwards our way of building software is.

Having a user display and draw on top of an image is trivial, and something our systems have been able to do for decades.

Streaming video bidirectionally is also trivial and well supported by our primitives at this point, even though it's merely a decade or two old rather than almost half a century.

And yet, if you want to combine these two very primitive operations, you need to find the app that supports exactly the use case you want (not guaranteed), or to be a developer yourself.

We're still catching up to Engelbart's demos, and it's disheartening.

When working remotely as a contractor I made a tiny whiteboard - https://onthesamepage.online/about I still use it for quick notes and spontaneous collaboration, since there are no accounts or registrations - it takes a few seconds to onboard a person. Also I was surprised that German school are using it (it’s heavily focused on privacy and requires no personal information). Sorry if it sounds like shameless promotion, but for me it was hard to find an alternative, something as simple as notepad.cc in its days, but for doodling.

Our UX and Prototyping team uses Mural. (https://mural.co/)

It's best with people who have the training or knowledge to facilitate the discussions, but it's an incredible powerful tool for remote ideation.

For ad-hoc, drawing on an iPad with PowerPoint is pretty good and makes it easy to share.

If only Half-Life: Alyx were multiplayer, it’s got pretty nice digital markers

https://gfycat.com/opulentkaleidoscopicflyingfox

I've been using Invision's Freehand tool [0] for whiteboarding in online meetings (also it's free). It's mostly worked about as well as a virtual whiteboard could be. It also allows for collaboration so everyone can draw on the same whiteboard at the same time.

[0] https://www.invisionapp.com/feature/freehand

I use Zoom on a computer (audio/video), share whiteboard and then connect to Zoom on my iPad and use that just for the drawing portion. It works great.

I've been messing with https://awwapp.com/ and https://ziteboard.com/. Google's Jamboard is not bad, but I don't want to deal with the inevitable shutdown.

Awwapp is pretty good

Invisionapp has a freehand draw mode that is shareable and collaborative. I've only used it for UX things(as that's what It's designed for) but honestly you could probably draw whatever so long as it's simple

I want my shared whiteboard in VR. My ideal solution is a multiuser tiltbrush.

instead of all these remote tools i like second life. designing and conceptualizing things in 3d is another dimension

mural.co is fantastic. works on multiple platforms and is especially good for ipad users.