Filling the Void of a Physical Whiteboard
blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk
blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk
That said, mermaid looks pretty nice —- going to try that out for my design documents once settled on an approach.
Where did you get the idea for this? Do you know if a similar function exists in any other drawing application, like Illustrator/Photoshop/GIMP/Inkscape?
MacOS has an option for "mouse keys" where one can toggle the keyboard to act as the directional control and click control for a mouse. So if I toggle it on, then I can use the "i" key to act as a mouse click and draw on the trackpad, and "m" key to hold a mouse click until I click "." to release it. And then I can toggle the mouse keys on/off by hitting the option key 5 times.
Woohoo!
Nice job!
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EDIT: After playing with it for a bit, I have some feedback :)
- Sometimes, I accidentally press Z instead of shift, or vice versa. I would love to have undo! Backspace or delete hotkey would be perfect.
- For selecting colors, it would be great to just be able to press 1,2,3,4 (rather than cycling through).
- I often forget what color I have selected. Perhaps the cursor could be colored to indicate this?
- When typing text, my first instinct was to use the arrow keys to move the cursor around, but this doesn't work. Also, it's hard to select where the cursor should go to edit.
- The shift and Z hotkeys are great. But I don't quite understand selecting the tools. If I can just hold down Z to erase, why would I ever select the eraser tool? It seems like the most efficient approach is to only ever have the text tool selected, so that at any time I can click to create text, but otherwise I use Z/shift to draw.
not sure if they added this literally in the last 18 hours, but the usual CMD+Z undo shortcut seems to work for me.
There are clearly some very serious logic and mode bugs present.
I’m using Firefox on Windows, and tried it with mouse, pen and touch.
- It interrupted my drawing-by-holding-LMB twice with the "just use shift" popup. Didn't happen again though.
- The "tip" of the text tool is not where drawing begins when I press shift. This is the result of placing the text cursor tip dead center on the top of the bottom line and then pressing shift to draw upwards: https://i.imgur.com/RKoiyar.png
Firefox 84.0, private mode.
Edit: I found out later conservative historian Niall Ferguson does this with PowerPoint. I tried PP. I like my system better because there's no structure to it. Good for brainstorming.
I'm not even sure how to explain it. Sometimes just putting something on the whiteboard, walking around, contemplating it, is what I need to do. I also use at least four different colors as needed. And today, with smart phones, it's very easy to capture what I've done and share with others.
Sometimes I'm creating a sketch, sometimes code, sometimes just a set of data structures. Once it was a system architecture, highlighting data exchange and functions. It can be one column or more, horizontal or angled, I can add curved arrows. Try to work out a bilinear interpolation scheme for a 3D grid over multiple time sets on a computer. Yeah, it can be done, but developing it on a whiteboard is, well, easier.
I need my whiteboard. I would be lost without it.
I have an iPad as well, and love going down this route if I'm presenting. However, my desire for perfect lines gets stronger and I'm not always the best at drawing...
* Google Drawings (yuck)
* LucidChart (yuck)
* Miro (good for diagrams, not for drawing)
* Jamboard (good for drawing, not for diagrams)
And a few inputs including:
* Wacom pencil (ok)
* Inklet pen (garbage)
* iPad Pro (great)
So far Jamboard / iPad pro is the closest to a true whiteboard experience that I've found, but it's pretty restrictive that it's tightly coupled to the physicality of the actual Jamboard, and you can't pan/scroll the whiteboard space like a lot of the pure digital options.
It would be nice to have a single tool that worked both for sketching/drawing (a la whiteboarding), but also could upgrade well to actual diagrams / boxes if you want to promote a collaborative sketch to something more permanent (say you're drafting a design doc and you want to use the sketch as your diagram-of-record).
On my list to test is the ReMarkable's shared drawing mode, haven't got round to trying that yet.
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Broan-Universal-Backsplash-Plate-Wh...
Anytime I've bought them in the past, I just walked into a Home Depot and asked for "shower board, marker board, the cheap laminated particle wood". There are typically a few types, more like a board, so I ask for the flimsy ones used for cheap showers, and they take me to a stack of them in the lumber area. They are very thin, like an eighth of an inch. You'll need a vehicle larger than a sedan, BTW, this are BIG. But you can also have them cut for you, often no charge.
The coating doesn't seem to be quite as thick. Perhaps a few coats of whiteboard conditioner before starting and at intervals would help.
If you don't put a faux border on it, then you get whiteboard ink dust on the walls and it looks kind of trashy. I speculate that your best bet would be to get a bunch of trim with a rabbet in the back, bolt the bottom piece to the wall, have someone hold the board in place while you bolt the top part on to keep it from shifting. Hide a couple of screws through the boards along the sides to make sure it doesn't buckle on you.
I've tried to use electronic whiteboard alternatives and it's just not as fluid when trying to get ideas out. Maybe an iPad Pro with a Pencil, but I haven't sprung for one of those yet...
[1] https://www.pegasusav.us/pegasus-magnetic-glass-marker-board...
Edit: Forgot architecture drawing software.
All the tech solutions I've tried fall far short of a real board (or collaborating on paper). Drawing with a mouse is terrible, but buying my team tablets etc. for this had its own set of challenged. Software at least lets remote workers see the same "document" but it's a pretty mixed bag too. I've tried most of them and haven't found something that really shines (including the dedicated ones like miro).
Half the time we end up drawing on paper and sharing images of that, which is also not ideal.
Anyone come up with a really workable replacement?
But, the whiteboard app is just so terrible. It feels like someone did an MVP and never gathered any feedback to improve it. It's essentially useless in it's current state.
We're 10 months into a pandemic and Teams still doesn't have a decent whiteboard feature.
Microsoft should be ashamed.
I'm in software engineering from a science background and I really feel the lack of being able to think about my code and systems in something as structured as the OP banged out.
I've tried the paint several times (including setting up commercial spaces) and it's always a bit disappointing and becomes difficult at best to keep clean.
For me, nothing is even remotely close to be able to replace whiteboard, brown paper and marker pens. I'm not saying that the void doesn't exist, it's just that the void currently is too big and all solutions are nowhere near filling the void.
With a whiteboard my experience is that everyone can pick up a pen and start contributing immediately.
Some times, to be able to discuss your problem space you need to remove all distractions.
I have had countless amazing meetings where we leave technology at the desk and sit down in a meeting room with a huge whiteboard and map everything out.
Heck, I even asked for a whiteboard to be installed in my office just to draw things out whenever I need to explain something.
It is even good for personal stuff. It's there until I wipe it away and always instantly accessible.
And it is fine, it is always on, you can draw as soon as you pick the stylo, the UI is minimal to non existent, you just you can drag the screen left or right to get more screen estate and when you are done you can email the result to your inbox. I actually like it.
It is not significantly better than a whiteboard, but also not worse. It is probably 100x more expensive though.
Edit: it might be cheaper than having someone that make sure that working markers are always available which is a common failure mode of phisical whiteboard. How long this will last we will have to see.
Reminds me of an interview of David Fattal, where the journalist asked him about how he got the idea of the holographic 3D screen: "My [...] colleagues go directly to tablets to work on mathematical computing software like Matlab or Simulink, where computations are guided. Due to that, they sometimes lack intuition. With my pen and paper, I work anywhere." (La Recherche, 2015/03, translated) Here I understand "anywhere" as both physically, and in the conceptual/mental space.
>Some times, to be able to discuss your problem space you need to remove all distractions.
And also all constraints/guidances.
I was involved in a very large system a decade ago that used robodoc. Robodoc has less features than doxygen but worked across more languages.
Swagger.io is a nice system although limited exclusively to REST APIs.
Anyway the examples above rendered extremely quickly even in 2010 and you could scaffold out entire ideas more or less in real time to get a whiteboard-ish experience assuming everyone on a conference call had a web browser window open.