> In general, don’t whiteboard sketches have a hand-drawn feel?
Whiteboard sketches on a physical whiteboard do, but in general, computer “whiteboard” sketches are a mixed bag that IMO land more often on the side of straight lines and perfect circles, especially if you look around at which computer whiteboard products are commercially successful.
> Seems like the trick would be a tool to give diagramming tools a hand-draw whiteboard sketch feel, or take hand-drawn whiteboard sketches and give them a diagramming feel.
Here’s one example of the former:
https://matplotlib.org/xkcd/examples/showcase/xkcd.html
The latter, converting sketches to diagrams, would be neat and is an interesting & difficult problem.
The thing that neither of these use-cases really cover is the need for a fast iteration / ideation tool in the exact same role as a physical whiteboard. Once you’re concerned about the presentation & look, the majority of time is spent working on the layout and the presentation because it takes longer to make it pretty than to just work out or communicate an idea without regard to beauty. Very small changes to where something goes or what it looks like can lead to a large and time-consuming ‘refactor’ of a diagram.