Hacker News Reader

My first three tests of anything like this are:

1. Does it keep up with rapid movement? (If something fails this, it’s a total non-starter.)

2. Does the eraser on the back of my pen work? (If not, it’s very frustrating and a very bad sign.)

3. Does pressure sensitivity vary the thickness of lines? (I just find it’s a bad sign if something lacks this—tools that support pressure sensitivity seem to pretty consistently be far better than tools that don’t.)

Witeboard fails all three, badly. So no way am I ever going to use it.

Ziteboard is a bit better at #1 (though still not good), but fails #2 and #3 and has hideous latency and accuracy as well—it’s postprocessing strokes heavily, which makes sense for mouse but shouldn’t be done either at all or as much for a pen. So I’m not going to use Ziteboard either, it’s unpleasant to use.

Browserboard is the worst of the three: hideous latency, terrible accuracy, missing the start and end of each stroke, and fails all three.

I’m using Firefox on Windows on a Surface Book. I know much better is possible, because I wrote a simple, local, pressure-sensitive drawing tool some years back (in the early days of pointer events), and it worked just about as well as local apps like Microsoft Whiteboard or Krita or GIMP do. All three of these tools just seem to be making rookie errors like doing too much processing probably on the main thread, and skipping coalesced events. (Those are my guesses of the problems, as a developer that has dealt with this space.) None of them are good; Ziteboard is merely the least terrible.

Those are great insights.

Have you found any online collaborative whiteboard tool that does what you want here? It is so frustrating compared to native apps where low latency, pressure sensitivity, and the pen eraser are table stakes.

Sorry, I haven’t ever gone looking.

Mr.doob's multiuser sketchpad has the essentials as far as real-time sharing and drawing capacity. It would work very well in private mode: you could share a link to start recording a live session.

https://multiuser-sketchpad.glitch.me

https://mrdoob.com/#/125/multiuser_sketchpad

As soon as I put my pen to the surface and made a big sweeping movement, it popped up five or ten alerts in a row, all reading “please, draw slowly”, and broke (the socket disconnected and stayed disconnected). Um. When I drew things small, this didn’t happen, but it was as badly broken as Browserboard in that it wasn’t registering the first (and maybe last?) short time of each stroke, which makes it completely useless for writing. So, total failure of #1, and #2 and #3 seem inapplicable by design so I can’t judge them. But I’m not in the slightest bit impressed with this, functionally.

What is the best one you've come across?

No idea. I’ve never needed a collaborative whiteboard, and for non-collaborative use I haven’t found anything on the web anywhere near as good as the desktop options of Microsoft Whiteboard and Krita (though Krita has a definite learning curve), so on the odd occasions I want to share things with others I just do screen sharing of these. I started making one of my own a few years back and had the basic interactions down pat, but shelved that project before it ever got really good or could have supported collaboration. Mine was also bitmap-based rather than vector-based, which is a significant difference in approach in some regards, losing you some functionality but gaining you a lot of speed.

More of an input for developers than actual suggestion but collaborative art boards like MagicalDraw[1] aren't new among digital artists and they're quite robust

1: https://draw.kuku.lu/index.php

> This is a non-supported browser.

> Your browser is not compatible with this site. Please try accessing the site from your Chrome browser.

That’s a new type of hard fail. That’s the first time I’ve had Firefox be rejected.

I... think back then(tm) those web apps used to run as Java Applet or Flash, then switched to HTML5 when those were obsoleted and while Firefox was still struggling to modernize.

> 2. Does the eraser on the back of my pen work? (If not, it’s very frustrating and a very bad sign.)

That's just such a random feature to expect from a web app, leave alone to use as a "very bad sign". I can see how it can be useful, but I disagree that the lack of it is critical.

The eraser not working is a sign the app hasn't been thought out from the perspective of graphic tablet users, which would likely be a pretty major target demographic.

Sure, but not to the level of a "very bad sign". Especially when the whole thing is sluggish to begin with and seems to be struggling with far more basic operational tasks.

If it's sluggish to begin with and fails basic operational tasks, sure, it doesn't matter that much whether the eraser works—because it hasn't even met the low bar to be judged on its tablet functionality at all.

Not all styli have erasers, but a very substantial fraction do. Detecting it is a basic operation when you’re using the Pointer Events API (event.button == 5 and event.buttons &== 32). I use not supporting this as a proxy for other basic errors of implementation, such as using mouse events instead of pointer events. This is why I say it’s a very bad sign. It’s a simple thing that I can point at and say, “this thing is half-baked; they have very probably done a bad job”, without needing to go through a larger battery of comparative and subjective tests.

And it also needs voice and video to be useful.

No it should definitely not. I really see this as an extra tool you use when you are already in a call with people, And if you don't like the Microsoft teams / zoom culture just use https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ its free and opensource and works just by sharing a url.

> Browserboard is the worst of the three: hideous latency, terrible accuracy, missing the start and end of each stroke, and fails all three.

Sounds like I have some work to do. Not owning a pen-based device seems to be really hurting my ability to create a good experience here. I only own Windows, Mac, and iOS devices, and no tablet.

Thanks for trying it out, I really appreciate the notes.

> All three of these tools just seem to be making rookie errors like doing too much processing probably on the main thread, and skipping coalesced events.

I promise Browserboard works really hard to get this right, though in JS it's not really possible to move things off the main thread. I wrote and maintain Literally Canvas, a fairly popular open source embedded drawing app, and dealt with some of these issues, but without owning hardware for testing it's really hard to cover the unknown unknowns.

Could you also give feedback on https://wbo.ophir.dev ?

Contrarily to the other mentioned before, it is opensource [1], and you can easily host your own instance if you don't like the idea of sharing your whiteboards on a random server on the internet.

[1] https://github.com/lovasoa/whitebophir

Thanks for commenting, this one worked for me.

Not GP. Tested on my Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1 (AKA. my sidearm), with Dell's active pen, running Firefox.

Works very well with the pen indeed. I love this, and the fact that it's self-hostable only makes it better. Also, props for deferring to the system color picker!

Awesomely responsive, great sharing model, very easy to use.

Drawbacks I saw (for my own use patterns):

- Not great for use with a pencil-based tablet: pencil vs. hand or other pointer are not distinguished. I don't want my finger to draw, I want only my pencil to draw.

- Couldn't find how to permanently set a different size for pencil vs. eraser. I want a huge eraser (and a large eraser didn't work too well, independently of this comment) but a thin point pencil.

- No "erase region" or "clear page" functionality.

All of the above may look independent, but in fact are highly inter-related. If I wasn't constantly smudging the screen with my fingers being confused for pencils, I wouldn't need an eraser that much. If the large eraser worked well (and I didn't need to reset the size every time I switch from pencil to eraser) I wouldn't need the "clear board" functionality.

The clear page functionality has been asked before, but I'm not sure I want to implement it. It seems useful when you are alone on your board, but when there are dozens of participants, you don't want a single one to be able to clear everything in a single button press, be it by mistake or maliciously.

Maybe add a confirmation dialog and clear the page while showing a message as to who cleared it?

If you already have an undo system then you could push the pre-cleared state to it as well.

it's easy to make armchair feature request suggestions when I haven't even so much just looked at the code, so I will end by saying good work on having a tool that people actually use!

Maybe require a quorum on the confirmation dialog? Less than 5 participants on the board - single confirmation. Less than 20 — 2 need to agree to erase. etc.

> https://wbo.ophir.dev

Good show!

It's impossible to get something exactly like Apple Pencil/iPad Pro, in a shared Web-based tool, but this comes close.

This one is excellent! Thank you for sharing it.

This worked great with my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. Well done!

I like that you can easily share a private board between people, unfortunately it didn't seem to work well with my mouse. Something about the postprocessing messed up every single line I was trying to draw, which made it impossible to write anything legible.

Edit: it's quite a bit better in chrome, but still not perfect.

Woo this is my new favorite whiteboarding tool! I love how I don't have to log in and that it works with my ipad pencil

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. I had a similar experience. Witeboard seems to have trouble with curves. Trying to draw an "o" would invariably result in geometric shapes, a perfect circle, or some sort of rectangle. I was experiencing a lot of latency as well, which only aggravated the situation.

There's a shape detection checkbox in the menu. That's probably the cause of geometric shapes.

Thanks for the tip.

I tried turning off that option and unfortunately it didn't improve things at all.

That stopped it from conversion to perfect circles or elongated rectangles, but I still have issues drawing anything with smooth curves. E.g. Here's a side by side just drawing "o's" at varying speeds on witeboard and ziteboard.[0]

To get anything remotely legible on witeboard, I have to be exceptionally slow. Even then, it's not a great result.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/QqJ3vpq

While you're trying things out, would you mind testing https://browserboard.com? It's a little thing I made similar to these tools. It's not commercial, I just want to make sure it works well.

My pleasure! I love trying out stuff like this, especially in these days of trying to whiteboard remotely. As it is getting late, I may just make this a brief test right now.

A minor point to note is that the URL with the www does not work - you may want to fix this:

https://www.browserboard.com

Also I love this bit of humbleness:

> A pretty good online whiteboard

So on to the handwriting test. Yes! You are much closer to the Ziteboard experience. Pen input works very well on both the ThinkPad Yoga and the Note 8 and it renders my writing nicely.

You seem to be doing a similar kind of smoothing that Ziteboard does? When I write on Ziteboard I see a bit of angularity as I write, which gets smoothed out when I'm done. Yours seems to do this more in real time.

One thing I got confused on: trying it on the Note 8, I wanted to scroll the view to get some blank space to write on. I found the four headed arrow icon which did exactly what I wanted - I can now scroll the view with the pen or finger. But now I can't figure out how to get out of this mode and write again?

More later as I experiment with it...

The pan feature works like a "tool", so you can select any tool (pen, text, etc) to get back to drawing.

Touch interactions are definitely a work in progress, I just want to make sure they aren't broken for now. :-)

I'm doing fancy incremental line smoothing. It's not that hard, but no one else seems to do this, and it really bugs me. It takes some effort to understand how and make it performant, but it's such a nice boost to the feel of it, in my opinion.

Yeah, that incremental line smoothing makes such a difference. Ziteboard is pretty good and I have no complaints about it - my writing seems a bit angular in realtime, but seeing that almost-immediate smoothing makes me think "Yeah, that's exactly what I meant to write."

But you do it immediately as I go!

I noticed a little bug on the Note 8 - when I'm on the main page where I can sign up or create a board, it's chopped off on the left and right sides. Selecting "Desktop site" from the Chrome menu fixes it.

I like it.

Its a little awkward that the line doesn't draw when your cursor / finger is held down, and only on release. Other than that, great. I had no dramas getting out of pan mode.

Tested on my Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1 (AKA. my sidearm), with Dell's active pen, running Firefox.

Works surprisingly well, it's the first web whiteboard that's actually usable with the pen. Congratulations on getting this right! One minor inconvenience: when I draw with the pen, it doesn't show the line I'm drawing until I lift the pen back.

I think you found a bug! I didn't build any special support for pens, and it sounds like something's wrong here.

late to this thread, but I noticed the same behavior on Firefox (81.0.1) without a stylus/pen. whatever tool is the default when creating a new board, when I started writing nothing showed up until I stopped clicking.

Tried it with my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, and it worked great. Well done!

How do you like your ThinkPad Yoga for note taking? I'm thinking if to get something like this or Samsung tablet for pdf reading and annotation writing notes on pdf for learning what do you think?

I don't actually use it that much for note taking, so can't advise on that specifically. I do use it for things like taking a screenshot and marking it up, and sketching out design ideas whiteboard-style. It works great for that, although most of the time I just use it as a conventional ThinkPad laptop.

In fact when I use the pen it is usually with the display hinge in "laptop" mode, not flipped all the way around to tablet mode.

Either way, as long as you have the software support you need, the hardware works great. It is both a touchscreen and a Wacom tablet with pressure sensitivity. At least the pressure sensing works in native Windows apps - web app support has been more spotty.

For annotating PDF files, I guess you would need Acrobat Pro? Or would you use some other software?

Right now on my computer I use foxit reader it's superb I think for annotation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KJoxZABjOY. So sounds like both Samsung and yoga are good for note taking and the only question is whether I want something light or something that could serve also as a laptop, thanks!

>It couldn't keep up with my writing and made a mess of it.

Could it be because of their feature called "shape detection"? It's on by default, you can turn it off in the menu.

Oh wow, ziteboard has a feature I’ve been looking for for ages: vector graphics rather that pixel graphics. You can zoom in indefinitely, making nested notes and annotations possible!

For whatever it's worth, I tried both Witeboard and Ziteboard with my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, and they both worked great, tracking superbly.

Seems like some kind of bug. It performs much better with trackpad input than touchscreen input.

you have a beautiful handwriting

Well thank you, you are very kind to say that.

I do have to confess my superpower though: the subtle smoothing that ziteboard.com and our friend irskep's browserboard.com apply. Without that, the writing would not be nearly as pleasant to look at.

Same experience using a Surface + Surface Pen.