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Comment by solidasparagus | Hacker News Reader

I love that this exist, but the core problem with remote whiteboards is that everyone can write something legible when using a marker on a whiteboard, but it's way harder with a mouse/trackpad.

It would be nice to have some features that made it easier - the features I really miss from apps I use to create diagrams are basic shapes like rectangles and the ability to select and move/resize/copy existing drawing.

Witeboard is great name BTW.

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Check out https://excalidraw.com/

Thank you! What I am missing is not a whiteboard. Whiteboard is just a solution that works in the office. The underlying requirement is: I want to be able to express myself in a visual way together with others. So a solution to the same requirement, that works remote, shouldn't have to mimick a whiteboard. Instead I would like the ability to : * Draw straight rectangles, lines and arrows

* Type text with my keyboard

* Move stuff afterwards

* Let participants point at different places simultaneously

I'm looking forward to trying out Escalidraw.

It seems to cover the first points, but not the last one.

The first points might also describe a diagram tool like draw.io

So I find miro.com does exactly all of this very well. It just happens to try to do a whole bunch of other stuff alongside it, which makes the initial investment in moving your team to using it quite substantial.

Try out figma. It wasn't made for this purpose exactly but it supports everything you just listed.

This is amazing! It's so clean and intuitive and it supports live collaboration and saving documents without ever registering for an account, love it!

You can get a decent little drawing tablet for $30 these days. You'd probably spend half of that in the cost of pens over the device's lifetime. They're no longer ultra-expensive specialized equipment.

> You can get a decent little drawing tablet for $30 these days. You'd probably spend half of that in the cost of pens over the device's lifetime. They're no longer ultra-expensive specialized equipment.

Can you suggest a model?

Not Wacom https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22247292

Well if you're on linux a second-hand one would be great, given you don't have their drivers (and you do have open ones). I have a Graphire3 6x8.

Huion H620 is a 4:3 tablet that is old enough to be pretty cheap. Their 16:9 tablets are just fine at least when I get the $40-60 ones.

Osu! Style drawing tablets are also a thing but they are small, maybe you want to spring for a slightly bigger tablet.

I got my wife an XP-PEN Deco01 V2 for $60 a couple months ago to help with teaching and it has been great. Not $30, but still very affordable.

A stylus that works with your existing device (phone or laptop, assuming touchscreen) works as well.

Plenty of cheap ones out there that work with most touch sensors

Most people probably already have an ipad or android tablet. Drawing with your fingers is already far better than a mouse and a basic active pen like the logitech crayon is within anyone’s range who has an ipad. There are many clipboard sharing options to quickly push a cloud whiteboard from the laptop to the tablet.

I don’t get why anyone would subject themselves to the pain of drawing with a mouse.

I do. I have an iPad and the Apple Pencil has made a huge difference for me, but I think its hard to expect everyone to have a device (even a cheap one) for that occasion when they want to contribute to the whiteboard.

> everyone can write something legible when using a marker on a whiteboard

Are you hiring?

(Just kidding, but I seriously wish that were true.)

Shameless plug: we built https://board.new with “hold shift to draw” which makes drawing with a mouse much easier.

That's really interesting -- it genuinely does make drawing with my mouse far easier!

I was trying to write with my mouse on the various whiteboards mentioned above and getting a garbled mess, but it's distinctly legible using your approach. :)

https://letsboard.co/boards/I0EGPMpLgZMa6HI3oQYhZHowjL32Q0eI...

> I love that this exist, but the core problem with remote whiteboards is that everyone can write something legible when using a marker on a whiteboard, but it's way harder with a mouse/trackpad.

I'm actually experimenting with that with my side project Doodledocs [1], that feature isn't live yet, though. Also, for the user, one thing I found is that if you hold a large paperclip in your hand like it's a pencil, you can make easier writing motions on a trackpad. I do this when I'm using my Macbook instead of my iPad.

[1] https://doodledocs.com is basically Witeboard but with a less pretty and more buggy interface :P (I wrote it last year as a side project)

> everyone can write something legible when using a marker on a whiteboard

You have obviously never seen my handwriting.

I am even worse on a computer with my mouse, though.

I generally tend to agree. But drawing on that thing from my tablet is pretty darn awesome, it is not that far from the real thing

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