Show HN: OurBoard – free and open source online whiteboard | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: OurBoard – free and open source online whiteboard

ourboard.io

178 pointsnullzzz58 comments

I've contributed some lines of code to this project, and thought it might be interesting to some that the library powering the UI is also written by the OP. It's a clever experiment that uses JSX but instead of VDOM diffing it embeds observables directly into the DOM.

Harmaja (https://github.com/raimohanska/harmaja)

This is my open-source project. I use it almost daily for simple whiteboarding, notetaking, online whiteboard sessions.

The idea is to have a simple and highly usable, fast alternative to more complex software such as Miro or Mural.

See if you can edit the title of this submission to add `Show HN: ` prefix? See https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html for details.

Also, perhaps edit your comment with link to the source code.

Done! Src at https://github.com/raimohanska/ourboard

Can you comment quickly on what state it's in? What features does it support? What does it offer that you wouldn't get with Miro or Mural? What are some features you might miss from those? Are you still actively developing it? What should we expect from it in the next year? Are you looking for collaborators?

For instance, something I quickly noticed is that there is no freehand drawing, arrows, or connection-building tools currently. Are those coming?

There are connection arrows. Click the icon that looks like a share button.

Quick overview:

- notes, areas for organizing, a few shapes and colors, connectors

- images and videos dragn drop / copypaste

- more on github readme

- not very active development lately. Just today I improved on the front page features

- You get a simple and easy board, where other tools may seem bloated and complex

No roadmap / plans. Contributions welcome.

You can also self-host this one very easily btw.

this no doubt appeals to a certain niche (of which I'm a part of), but this (along with open source) is a massive benefit. Thanks so much!

How do you use online whiteboards in you organization? (I've never tried)

I think I'm missing something. How do you use it for whiteboarding? Where is the pen tool?

Also, is the change log in a working state? I can't seem to make it show anything. Is it possible to close it after you've opened it?

No pen tool sorry! Change log is not fully functional.

Whiteboarding maybe a bit misleading here. Let’s call it a sticky note wall, with images and connectors?

So it’s a flowchart wall? As the earlier user shared, I can’t seem to get the wall to do anything either. Sticky notes can’t be dragged and the text on the site gets cut off at the site’s edges. I’m on iphone.

Yeah it’s mobile-dead, works on desktop.

Congrats for reaching this state. I really like the clean and simple interface.

What I am missing are a few more sentences about hosting. I saw the documentation about the variables and the commands to host a dev environment, but which commands should I use to run it in production?

Thanks! May I ask you to open a Github issue on this, and I’m sure we can get u up an running. HN isn’t a great support forum :)

This is great, congrats for shipping. It also reminds me a bit of Padlet in that there is no freehand drawing and the focus is more around connections between objects. Maybe it would be better to describe it as a corkboard or pinboard.

I do have some layout issues in Chrome, y is overflowing so I get two y-scrollbars.

I agree that there is a need for this.

I don't want to remain locked to their closed systems.

Godspeed!

Here's an Ourboard board that demonstrates the key features of the service. https://www.ourboard.io/b/0b5a9bd8-93ae-446c-afbd-80ebfcb1e0...

It's read-only, but you can select all (Cmd-A), create a new board and paste the contents on a new board of yours on the Ourboard front page.

I now realize that a Fork Board feature might be useful.

Also having second thoughts on whether it's a good idea to have a "default board" that's read-write for anonymous users. Some political content observed on that one today.

Given the racist stuff being thrown around on it now, it’s probably better that you just make it generate a random new board with example data.

Yes. The shared global board definitely has to go. Should have known not to trust people to behave…

At some point I have to wonder if it is actual racists or HN users poking holes into moderation, security, etc. This seems a bit too niche to be the target of random actual racists.

Racism is .. well, everywhere. The technical community isn't immune to it.

Title says whiteboard. Can't draw on it. Hmmm.

This is more like a free-form Trello board.

That's a good point. It's definitely not a drawing tool. More of an electronic version of post-it notes and images on a whiteboard. You can "draw" diagrams using shapes and arrows and text, but not freeform. I personally haven't missed freeform drawing.

I work with physicists and circuit designers. To us, "whiteboard" is synonymous with freeform drawing...

I come from the software consulting buble. Post it notes everywhere.

And it's grey. This is in no way a whiteboard, it's a grey wall for post-its.

I have tried quite a few online whiteboards during the pandemic WFH. IMHO nothing comes close to https://excalidraw.com

No signup needed, clean interface, fast load times and an option to self host makes it an excellent product.

Excalidraw is pleasant indeed! Thanks for the introduction :-)

That looks really sharp! I’ve been very pleased with Miro for corporate use though.

Miro has an interesting learning curve (at least for me). I absolutely hated it for the first couple dozen times I used it.

Then, there was one meeting where it was particularly effective in running a “sticky note” exercise and my opinion on it flipped that day from around -7 to +3 [on a -10 to +10 scale]. It’s grown slightly on me since then as well; I might be a +5 on it right now.

We used it to run remote PI Planning and it was very effective for that.

I like Excalidraw too, but in my opinion OurBoard has a different focus.

- Excalidraw is superb if you want to draw something freestyle.

- Ourboard seems to focus more on creating boxes (notes) which you can group and connect. If I understand it correctly, you can even load Github issues into your board.

At the start of the pandemic, I searched for Whiteboards where I could draw things freestyle (installed MS Whiteboard), but over time I noticed, that I used MS Powerpoint most of the time, because it was so much better at handling boxes in collaborative environments. I think OurBoard could be even better at this job.

Iirc Excalidraw is built on top of Google Firebase. That doesn't make it less nice, but imo it shouldn't count as open source or self hostable.

I didn't see a draw function or way to upload an image. For me, these are pretty critical in a whiteboard tool.

Images can be drag/dropped or copy pasted onto the board. Freeform drawing is not supported.

The hover text for "note" and "area" both say "drag to add a new text note". Then the one for "text" says "drag to add a new text area". I'm not sure if that's on purpose, but it's confusing. Though all three function in a way that's consistent with their respective icon.

Also, on the "area" widget, there's a popup when I click on it, with a background color picker and font size choice. But there's also an icon with 4 squares arranged 2x2. It's not clear what that does.

Thanks for the input, that’s highly appreciated! Let’s see about this soonish. You can also use Github issues at https://github.com/raimohanska/ourboard/issues

It’s not mobile friendly at all though

Even the home page is mangled on my iPhone SE 2nd edition

Especially the home page is a total disaster :( The actual board view is read-only usable. This is definitely a fixer. Wanna contribute? :)

This looks great. Thanks for sharing!

If folks are interested in this sort of thing, I also maintain an extremely minimalist open source whiteboarding tool:

https://github.com/jncraton/box-line-text

Looks cool! Like the super plain appearance and simplicity. Would suit to screencasts and quick diagrams, while OurBoard is more of a collaboration tool, I’d say.

Thanks! The goal is simplicity, so it doesn't attempt feature parity with a more comprehensive tool like yours. Collaboration features, along with any features that can't be implemented on simple static hosting, are out of scope.

I really like the collaborative nature of what you've built. I can definitely imagine using this in meetings or group planning sessions.

Totally breaks the back button for me

Sorry for that! Could you elaborate on the scenario and your setup so we can see what can be done?

Happened to me, too (Safari 14.1.1, macOS 11.4).

Once I went to a board, I could back to the board selection screen, but no further, including back to HN. It just doesn't go - no errors in the console, but never goes back further. Are you doing something with the browser's history?

Okay this is good info, thanks! Created an Issue here: https://github.com/raimohanska/ourboard/issues/160

It's a single-page app so to support in-app navigation (back button etc) it needs to interact with the browser's History API.

I'm mildly surprised that the view rectangle in the "mini-map" in the bottom right is not draggable with the usual semantics of panning the view. Or at least if it's supposed to work that way, it doesn't in my browser.

Yep, that’s missing and would make sense. It’s an open source hobby project so it’s bound to have some rough corners :)

Looks cool, unfortunately Figma already did the perfect solution called FigJam and it’s absolutely awesome and free.

Why would that be unfortunate, it sounds awesome! Gotta give it a try.

Heroku error :) That was fast.

Edit: never mind, back up!

Oof. Would check logs if not at the gym atm IRLOL

Heroku killed the app but it was fortunately span back up quickly. Apparently 512MB memory on a single Heroku dyno is not Hacker News scale. The application does have a horizontally scalable architecture for sharding boards on multiple hosts, it's not just fully deployed as there has mostly been just 1-2 boards in use at any given time.

Looks extremely promising!!!

There's a bug that hijacks your back button. At least on mobile.

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