Why is Excalidraw so good?
offbyone.us
offbyone.us
Everything:
“ You're in #
There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth. You're just in the product. Are there any flashy overlay tours with annoying animations and pulsing buttons? Is there a modal upselling you on a paid plan[1]? No. You're just in product, able to use it.”
Get rid of your fancy growth marketing people, your advisors with their “request a demo”.
Get rid of your intro page talking features.
Dump your stupid signup before starting.
Just. Fucking. Let. People. Instantly. Use. Your. Full. Product.
Instantly. Not after they give their email. Not after they click three dialogs. Not after they jump through whatever remaining hoops you’d really really love them to jump through before.
Show them, indeed GIVE them your product without the slightest fucking delay.
All of it. Stop arguing about why you’d really love to make them do something else before using your product. Make your marketing person stop insisting the marketing thing gets done first.
Get people into your actual full product within the shortest possible time. Milliseconds if possible.
- Does it actually lead to higher sales? If not, nobody is going to care about our wish for more companies to do this.
- It doesn’t work for many products. How do you just drop someone into a cloud storage product? You could give them some temporary space where they can drop some files if they want, but what do you do if they abandon them? Delete them after some time? Might confuse some customers who didn’t realize they had to actually register an account. Maybe a huge banner with a countdown would work… you start to have to solve a whole lot of problems to make it work
This stifles development of things that are actually useful. It puts money and influence in the hands of people who shouldn't have either, creating bad incentives in the market and within the company. It gives marketing a gloss of false legitimacy, allowing for all the things that have us in a feverish race to the bottom.
Everything you just touted has been achieved despite the Idiocracy fan-fic that seems to be the current mission statement of corporate America.
In the webapp ecosystem, those transaction costs take the form of annoying signup pages and mail spam. Could be worse.
- Products that don't require any of this stuff.
- Products that require some form of registration since it stores user data remotely. The person registers so they may secure, modify, or remove that data. The handling of personal data should serve this role exclusively.
- Products that require some form of initial setup and onboarding will facilitate that setup for the vast majority of people. The user should still be able to bypass the onboarding in case their use case doesn't reflect the common use case.
When marketing becomes involved, things become problematic. That friendly offer of assistance to get started usually reflects marketable features rather than any form of genuine training. That collection of personal information is used to harass the person using the product rather than to facilitate the use of the product. (Heck, I have companies contacting me over a decade after I last used their product to try to make a sale.)
I think this is a really, really interesting phenomena: the human brain (perhaps when sufficiently institutionalized) exhibits some sort of fundamental bias toward disruptive UX that breaks flow and productivity, and this approach must be proven wrong, every time, on a case by case basis, and doesn't fundamentally internalize.
It's crazy: because it doesn't lead to higher sales, it's seen as a bad approach. WHY? "Just because."
If the goal of a company is to create higher sales, then it is a bad approach.
If the goal is to create a great tool used by people and not worry about adoption or supporting a large business through profit, it's probably a great idea!
I love that - and that's how I aim to build things now.
Excalidraw has few calls to external domains as well - just Google Analytics and Sentry.io. That's still two that can be reduced, but it's much better than most modern clustertrucks.
That said, those two have been really important for the success of the project. Google Analytics is helpful to get a sense of how important it is to people and motivation for the team. The second one helped us fix a lot of edge cases that couldn’t immediately be found via normal testing.
But it's not exactly clear how you plan to turn that into, say, revenue. Build it and they will come, sure. And the more leads you stuff into the top of the conversion funnel, the more conversions, right? What do you mean 'qualified' leads?
If your product's viability will rest on turning some percentage of those free users into subscribers or purchasers, then you have to do some upsell, at some point. And if they can get into the full product without any obstacles within milliseconds, you're going to have a very, very hard job getting those conversions. Meanwhile you're winning over free users who cost you money and time to serve in handling their support and feature requests, and you're bringing in ever more people who are never going to give you any money.
It is viable to build your product this way if the primary product your business sells is 'convincing investors that by building up loyal active users, and developing rich understanding of those users' behavior, you will somehow create a reservoir of value that can be sold for 10x the amount of money you're asking them to put in to keep your servers turned on for another few months'
And it's probably viable if you aren't trying to be a business at all.
But as generic 'this is how all products should work' advice, it's pretty terrible, unless your main advice is 'don't try to make a business around offering a software product unless you're primarily interested in selling engagement monetization fairytales to investors'.
Ready to save your new work of art?
Or higher resolution?
Or premium features?
You do it when the user is hooked.
I was not advocating for “no revenue”.
Also it seems self evident that such advice does not apply to all software…. Do you think I’m saying this is how SAP should be sold? No…, obviously the advice applies to software suited to this approach.
‘Thanks! Oh wow, this is great!’
‘Glad you like it.’
‘I love how you don’t try to upsell me on things or push any kind of premium paid features, just give me the whole product without limitations’
‘Yeah, that’s our philosophy, let you fall in love with the product’
‘Cool, thanks. Okay, I’m gonna save my work now.’
‘$20, please’
‘I’m sorry what?’
‘$20 to save.’
‘Er… could you have mentioned this earlier? I just spent ages using your awesome product and you just let me in and I didn’t have to sign up or anything, and you never mentioned a premium upsell, so I just assumed…’
‘Yeah, I thought I might be able to trick you like that. We call it “bait and switch”. Isn’t it so much better than all that marketing BS?’
The key realization is that while the unauthenticated open source model works really well for individuals, it’s hard for companies to adopt.
They want authentication, security policies, private spaces to collaborate, access control, search… all of this requires having a company behind it in practice and the open source model doesn’t work as well.
The two versions so far work really well alongside each other right now.
How did you get people to try the free version? What worked?
Only a relatively few people like you and me really want to dive in without having a story first. Turns out, to my surprise (!) that most people don’t want to dive into your app without reading about it or watching a video first.
Teachers, kids, business users, they all have different questions they want answered before they spend time trying to learn a new app, they want to know if there are reasons this can or can’t be the thing they use from now on. Learning a UI is a time investment, and people want to make sure it will be a good investment before using their time. They don’t want to be tricked into learning your UI for a week or two or more and then find out later it can’t group and copy-paste shapes, or that the price goes up, or that they can’t share they way they need, or that your app doesn’t have a on-premise installation.
Getting in quickly can have a low barrier to entry, I’m with you there, but my experience on the other side of this is that it’s not good to go directly to the app without an intro first, generally speaking.
Aside from this there’s also the fact that users who don’t intend to pay are on average way more demanding, way less patient, and way less understanding about communicating and learning the UI and dealing with bugs or misunderstandings. It was surprising for me to see from the other side how rude the free users are on average compared to the paying users.
Or create a youtube channel for it.
No need to spoil the tool for everybody with marketing cruft.
In my experience, this also applies to cheap vs expensive projects (consultancy). Customers start to get really pleasant and polite when they are charged at least 100K or something like that for doing some custom software development. They get very demanding when it's below 10K.
Shouldn't it be win/win? Both sides giving something to help each other? Software gets tricky I guess since it's fun to develop, and mere attention or praise is enough for many devs. And ads blur the line of "free". But the level of childish entitlement gets a little depressing sometimes.
I don’t see it as having to do with entitlement, more as a case of it being easier to standout in a crowd of options when your thing is easier to start with.
You are also advancing the art. Which is an objective good.
Excalidraw+ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034119 - May 2021 (31 comments)
Show HN: It was fun generating version distributions charts for Excalidraw - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25792169 - Jan 2021 (1 comment)
One Year of Excalidraw - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25608336 - Jan 2021 (19 comments)
Show HN: Create a Slideshow with Excalidraw - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081914 - Nov 2020 (1 comment)
Excalidraw whiteboard – easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525648 - June 2020 (54 comments)
Building Excalidraw's P2P Collaboration Feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719576 - March 2020 (1 comment)
Show HN: Excalidraw – Sketch Hand-Drawn Like Diagrams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146973 - Jan 2020 (6 comments)
Excalidraw – a whiteboard tool to sketch hand-drawn diagrams (excalidraw.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104502 - Jan 2020 (3 comments)
Excalidraw – a whiteboard tool that lets you sketch hand-drawn diagrams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101381 - Jan 2020 (21 comments)
Since there was no link in the article :)
Now my only other complaint with excalidraw is that for some reason on my iPad Pro in Safari, the handwriting is incredibly laggy, increasing the longer the stroke is. Which is weird, because in every other browser I've tried (Safari/Chrome/Firefox on various laptops) it's incredibly snappy.
Glad to see things are improving! That's a sure sign of a company that listens to users.
We switched to the awesome “perfect” library from Steve Ruiz instead. Could you create an issue about the lag on ipad pro, we should investigate and fix.
Given that you already have Dependabot active, would you consider getting the dependencies somewhat up to date? Looks like the pull requests already exist... Thanks.
Did you read through the security issues identified, familiar with the codebase enough that you can see that these issues are actually affecting the product?
Most issues Dependabot opens on repositories I'm involved in, points to issues that has no bearing on the actual code, since it's security issues that are involving passing user code to specific functions, or simply regarding APIs that are never used in the first place.
You don't have to be on the newest version of every single library, in most cases it doesn't make any sense to just upgrade for the sake of upgrade.
Create a GitHub native tools suite for LTS management of all releases of all languages/platforms, then we are talking about security.
https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/issues/4205
If there’s any other way I can help please lmk.
Will open an issue on github.
This is good advice for people for whom money is not a concern anymore, and their goal in life is to make random hipsters on the internet 'love them'. For the rest of us the goal is to make money with our work (and we get the love mostly from our family and friends.)
What a one-sided article with so many upvotes...
The creator of Excalidraw made a comment somewhere else on this page about how well Excalidraw+ is doing.
> The plus plan has been very successful from my point of view, we’ve been able to bootstrap the business and make our first hire. The key realization is that while the unauthenticated open source model works really well for individuals, it’s hard for companies to adopt.
> They want authentication, security policies, private spaces to collaborate, access control, search… all of this requires having a company behind it in practice and the open source model doesn’t work as well.
> The two versions so far work really well alongside each other right now.
I think there are certainly products out there that can't pull this off. And, that's a fair point.
The requirement that a piece of code make money is a major liability and automatically throws its future into question. It means the metric has changed from "does this solve the problem?" to "does this make enough money?"
When desperate measures are being taken to monetize code, people sensibly run away. Users just want to use tools that work without getting jerked around.
You want free software, that never asks you for money, that stays updated?
This describes my first time experience with Miro. I just wanted to get started, but each new action resulted in another 'tour'. I patiently exited each tour, only to be hit by another tour/upsell/modal/what's new. Within 2 minutes I've now formed my first impression of Miro as being 'infested', and I reflexively microshudder when people talk about it.
First time user experience feels severely underrated by many companies.
My eyesight’s not great. I typically use my computer at about 1.7x with pan&scan following my cursor. It’s not ideal but I can see (and am a career front-end dev with global brands on my CV). ANY kind of attention grabbing device is 1.7x more distracting to me than someone who can use their machine w/out zoom. I rely far more on my memory of where content and controls apprar than a fully sighted person, so having to find a new control (close) for a popup I didn’t ask for is a significant workflow impediment.
You mean like pretty much every single darned productivity program before year 200X?
It's sad that this even has to be an issue.
That said, I'd also misunderstood the grandparent comment: they meant that it's a shame that Excalidraw is one of the few apps nowadays that have these features, even if the other ones also have advantages like not requiring an install.
Makes me want to ditch the product on the spot. Yes, I've seen your emails. Yes, I will let you know if I need anything. No, I don't need a zoom call/onboarding video/introductory convo with your marketing team.
What I think those stats miss is that I will test a product with one email and if I decide to buy for a team will use a new account. So it looks like the conversion happened immediately skewing their sales/marketing strategy.
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First of all it's a free, open tool, MIT license, that is also hosted for free.
It loads instantly without an installation step. You just type in the URL and it works.
It's not a "productivity program" specifically as illustrated in the article.
The design is very simple, intuitive and deliberately minimalist, while it does quite a bunch of subtle things under the hood that harmonize with the overall goal of the program.
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Now there may have been tools kind of like this in the 90's. Not aware of any of them from the top of my head.
Of course, arguably one did have to pay for it and install it - but that was a one-off thing.
Yes, you could use Excel 95 by just double-clicking on an icon.
However, not only did you have to buy and install the software, which back in the day often meant going to an actual brick-and-mortar store to purchase a shrink-wrapped box labelled "Office 95", but it even required buying a specific type of computer with a specific operating system first.
In this specific case, that doesn't even take into account Microsoft's shady tactics of strong-arming vendors and OEMs into exclusively shipping Microsoft software with their products.
So, arguably, the barrier to entry still was a lot higher than with even the most obnoxious growth hacking tactics we see in many SaaS products today.
That said, I absolutely love the way Excalidraw are "onboarding" users.
It's just worth remembering that not everything went downhill with SaaS products (in fact, quite the opposite) and not everything was better "back in the day".
Excalidraw feels like a product of this time, and demonstrates some of the things we all enjoy about the web as an ecosystem. People compare it to some yesteryear product because of its purposeful feature set and look / feel, but name something from back then.
You insert the CD, install the software, and then it's ready to use. That's it.
To reiterate the quote from the article the GP mentioned:
> There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth. You're just in the product.
It's just sad that you even have to have that in your checklist of things nowadays. Like it's amazing when software doesn't ask you to make another damned online account and just lets you use it. (And it's good that this doesn't, yay.)
Hosted is a negative feature to me (other than for trying the software). You don't control the software installation.
Tomorrow you could wake up and try to continue your work, to discover that some feature is missing you were depending on, or new bugs are happening that weren't there and so on. Or your local storage is borked because it's not being read correctly by the newly installed code.
It's good if something is hosted for trying out, but you want it to be locally installable so you and your team can depend on it, and evaluate updates before rolling them out, and roll back bad updates.
"Has local storage" is another thing that is sad to see as having to tick off a checklist.
Shocking! Who would have thought? /s
It would display a dialog when you opened the program. Every. Damn. Time. Displayed a useful tip from the included documentation.
At the time, it felt like a huge, complicated, OLE application, a big departure from the previous version, Word 5.1.
I suspected that some members of the Word 6 product team felt the same about that startup dialog: at a loss to suggest anything productive for that "Useful product tip for today", they wrote down some inane safety tips.
"Welcome to Microsoft Word... You can hurt yourself if you run with scissors."
I then read that it was free and open, so felt bad, but did notice an ad for Excalidraw+, which basically means my cynical first take is likely to come true eventually, as that is what the market will optimize towards.
You'd be lucky to have it all done in less than a week and a few hours of your time. How soon they forget!
You still have to today. A lot of stuff is Mac/Windows/Linux exclusive. Sure, I can run Windows stuff on Linux and vice versa if I'm tech savvy, but Mac stuff requires buying Apple hardware, so that's a massive barrier right there.
>figure out where and how you can buy it
Or you could just download it. The internet existed pre 200x as well.
> then manually enter a product key (fun!)
Honestly, it was fun. Much more fun than the phone-home, always-on telemetry and invasive DRM that act like rootkits & spyware we have today. Good luck playing older games you bought and paid for who's DRM require authentication from the publisher's servers that went offline years ago. Yeah, fun!
Back then, you paid for the product, you got your license and CD key, you owned it forever. No subscription rent seeking model BS.
Maybe I'm just old and cranky.
Outside of free software/shareware, there wasn't a lot of software available for download in the 90s. And compatibility was a lot jankier in that the base systems sold to consumers were insufficient to run a lot of popular software. For folks like you or me, probably not a problem (unless you happened to have a graphics card that wasn't supported) since we'd generally have obscene (by the standards of the day) amounts of hard disk and RAM, but Mom's computer might have 4M of RAM and a 10G hard drive.
Back in the floppy disk era the thing that always drove me nuts was that most (with very few exceptions) software vendors put the software key on the label of disk 1. Which would be in the drive when they asked you to enter the software key. I remember some OS/2 software that put it on disk 2 instead and I wanted to go to the company and kiss whoever it was who decided to do that.
Well - as recently as a couple years ago - even if it was a web-based tool, you would have to check which browser was supported.
Things have gotten better now that Microsoft has deprecated the entire IE-chain and moved to Chromium-based Edge. Things "just work".
I still have my Windows 98 product key and installer stashed away, purchased decades ago. And I actually used them a few months ago to stand up a VM to utilize an ancient printer.
Way better for me-the-consumer than the subscription-everything model. When software decides to go that way, I usually find a FOSS alternative or cling to the last standalone version.
Being prompted to create an account to use a word processor didn't come until later.
That said, the app itself has great UX, especially onboarding. Just straight to drawing mode. Kind of like autodraw.io.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arpanet_logical_map,...
The perfectionist in me won’t let me publish a regular, square-edged diagram unless it’s pixel-perfect. As a result, nothing ever gets published.
Take away that absurd situation, make the whole thing a bit shabby, and the need for perfection disappears. In fact the ability to make it perfect disappears.
Life changing. Sounds daft. Is absolutely true.
The most important missing feature at the time was that to doesn't show other user's selections unlike many other collaboration tools. That means what you see is not what you're collaborators see. If you grab some shapes they don't see that you grabbed them. If you highlight a word or item in a list, they don't see you highlighted it.
Further, unlike pretty much all similar software, they don't connect shapes and text. Place a shape, double click, a text box appears in the center of the shape. Drag the shape, the text doesn't go with it. This makes it super inefficient for most common use cases. People might want to separate the text from the shape but I'd argue that's an exception and should not be the default.
Also agree on missing some kind of laser pointer and or highlighter.
This should work out of the box if you're collaborating. But, we've recently upgraded our collaboration servers and due to ServiceWorker caching it may be your colleague (or you) were connecting to the old one. Try hard refresh your browser.
I am using PlantUML instead and C4 some time ago. Works very well inside VSCode, but Mermaid was quick.
Long live `dot`!
I think I finally settled on mermaid cause it fits flawlessly into markdown based writing or documenting software. I don't think it's anywhere close to dot in it's comprehensiveness though.
Mermaid looks far more modern.
Defaults matter a lot.
Feel free to jump in on it
Notice how parts of the letters are weighted. That helps with identifying which part of the letter is bottom.
And its monospace equivalent for coding is OpenDyslexicMono
Is it maybe just a matter of getting used to it?
Otherwise sure, the bewt option would be probably for people to use their own font and make it easy to do so (@browsers)
Features that improve accessibility for a subpopulation while decreasing it for the broader population are /not/ part of that thesis.
The topic of dyslexia friendly fonts falls somewhere in between. Some fonts are considered friendlier than others and are fine for the general population (verdana), others are friendlier to dyslexics but hideous to the general population (open dyslexia). I call it a gray area because they’re ugly, and do not improve readability for the general population, but not overtly inaccessible to the general population.
This philosophy is based on the red-hot idea that the protecting the needs of someone in the majority is as important as doing it for the minority.[0] It also sets up the false dichotomy, part of the same rhetoric, that it's one or the other, them or me.
It's not the same at all: The majority doesn't need protection: Almost everything is built for and by the majority; the engineers, executives, funders, and reviewers are generally in the majority; everything they do is from that perspective, automatically. Including people who aren't in the room is a real effort. Also, there's productivity, stress, and basic equality: Almost everything people in the majority encounter is built for them. If you are in the minority, your day is filled with obstacles, problems, and ignorance, which not only slows you down but wears you down; it pushes you to the margins and makes you an outsider.
It's not a zero-sum tradeoff; you can help both groups. And generosity toward those who need it is a virtue; it's about justice and fairness, and their freedom to maneuver in society. I'm not sure what to call generosity toward those who have the power.
[0] Really, rather than majority and minority, we should be saying those with power and those without, but that adds another dimension to the conversation.
After the wedding, we got feedback from almost everyone that we’d given access to that it was a fantastic tool and it had made everything super easy.
Absolutely brilliant experience, and I know it sounds pithy, but it took a load off our minds knowing that no-one would have different interpretations or versions or broken Excel sheets that didn’t clarify, or ugly Paint drawings etc.
It's very basic and probably not for everybody but I usually use r for rectangle, t for text and l for line, then copy and paste or screenshot.
Its a general purpose DAG/flowchart editor completely optimized for keyboard shortcuts. No need to touch the mouse almost ever. Like excalidraw you can use a basic version immediately, no account. I recommend watching the 1min video and checking out the keyboard shortcuts menu because its a bit different from other flowchart editors.
1min tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPR0samb194
Also, I like the name; glad they didn't call it "Drawify" "Charitify" "Whitebordify" "Thinkify" ... you get my drift.
We just shipped image support which has been widely requested, this is next in our list.
I’d suggest a 20-pixel gutter on either side of the page.
Looks like an interesting product. Thanks!
I have vimium installed so ? displays viumium help. This is a remainder that still there is a gap between native apps and in-browser apps. Yes, it is shrinking, but browser was never designed as the platform the run full-featured applications. So expect the unexpected.
But, true, comparing to other software of this kind this one looks really good.
Does that mean they shouldn't ever change to become a platform for full-feature applications? Is there a reason why browsers shouldn't evolve and grow and add new capabilities? We don't believe that operating systems should be static once they've been released, or that applications should never add new features that enable them to run scripts or plugins. What's wrong with browsers doing more than Tim Berners-Lee envisioned 30 years ago?
Sure, browsers were once designed to view docs. Now they do more. That's a good thing even if it throws up some design, UX, and security challenges.
I think they are referring to the actual button in the UI, which is in the button right, not the "?" key on your keyboard which might or might not be in the bottom right in your keyboard.
Anyway, as a user of Vimuim, you're surely used to keyboard shortcuts already being funky, and you know about the "escape" mode it surely offers in order to trigger keyboard shortcuts that conflicts with your own bindings. Just use that instead of complaining as it's your own setup that makes things difficult, not the website owners fault really.
It's a bit like writing something like "Hey, I use a extension that makes all elements background black on page load, and on your website, since the text is already black, makes it very hard to read stuff"
I say this as a vim-keybindings-in-browser user myself too.
Excalidraw can be used on basically everything that has a compatible browser: Windows, almost all Linux distros, macOS, Android and iOS, major BSDs ... and that's not even counting in x86 vs x86_64 vs all the different versions of ARM machines we have now. Try to reach all those people without a tech stack based on web. Sure, you can still get desktop and mobile apps by cramming everything into electron or its mobile counterparts, but then we are back to comments like "I miss the days when desktop apps were less than 100MB"?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We're also working to expand into OpenGL UX too. You can see our latest progress at https://github.com/jacereda/cosmogfx and the screenshots are here https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/35#issuecomment-... which we're working hard to polish and get merged into the mainline. If you read threads like https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/309 you can see we're committed to making sure your gui apps just work even on traditionally underserved platforms like OpenBSD because our goal is to help you reach the broadest audience possible.
Please consider supporting the project!
This whole cosmopolitan-fanboy'ism is completely ignoring my initial statement. What are you trying to bring to the table here? Sorry if I sound harsh, but you are really just proving my point here while probably not even realizing it.
I didn't expect anything of value or meaningful as a response anyway. Thanks for confirming.
> That only solves 10% of the problem, binary portability. You still need to code for a dozen different graphics, I/O, storage etc system APIs.
Read https://justine.lol/ape.html for a deep dive into how we managed to do it. It mostly just boils down to the numbers file mentioned in the last paragraph. That gets you far enough to do sockets and stdio. That in itself is a big step forward. Is it good enough to make apps like Excelidraw binary portable? Not yet. But it gets us much closer than we were before. Getting the rest of the way there is an ongoing topic of engineering and experimentation. Many people are helping. Further support is welcome from those who share a genuine interest in contributing to our efforts to solve the binary portability problem.
Of course I know excalidraw is open source, so someone could just fork it if the developers gave up on it. But this is only true with open source web apps.
http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/apple/lisa/office_sys...
(The well-written documentation is another nice aspect of LisaDraw.)
https://bitsavers.computerhistory.org/pdf/apple/lisa/office_...
On the other hand, I like that it actually handles pressure, though even the thinnest pen size is rather thick at the default zoom level and kind of hard to write with.
I’ve been noticing this design trend in other sites too and I really like it
I wouldn't mind an offline version. I usually need to do this kind of work on planes.
Just a friendly reminder that "web !== requiring internet 24/7 internet connectivity", many client-side applications works even if you go offline, granted you have loaded the page at least once before.
Try loading the page, disconnecting your internet and then doing a hard-refresh/reload your browser.
Should you choose to share a drawing, it would be end-to-end encrypted and sent to the Excalidraw server. The sharing URL contains the ID of your drawing for retrieval, and the encryption/decryption key in the URL hash, which never reaches Excalidraw's servers (thus achieving E2EE).
> deleting all of a website’s script-writable storage after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site.
So as long as you access the application once a week, you're safe. Or, alternatively:
> As mentioned, the seven-day cap on script-writable storage is gated on “after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site.” That is the case in Safari. Web applications added to the home screen are not part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use. Their days of use will match actual use of the web application which resets the timer. We do not expect the first-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted.
Still, horrible idea and horrible implementation, but I think it's known by know that Apple/Safari will always be hostile towards web apps as it cuts into their own App Store revenue.
But we need to do another pass at it, the lack of move tool is really annoying indeed. I also want to add more gestures.
Procreate is so good and we should aim to be a similar experience.
Example of a saas that does this?
Um...what?
Frankly, stuff that looks like this just annoys me.
Brings me back to the Mac 1984 days,
Gonna have to pay these guys.
Kidpix. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
"Oh, just google it"
"Yes, but google was not present in the WWW design, was it? And then you have to worry about fakes, clones, phishing sites... The new generations turned the web into an interactive newspaper with more ads."
Sometimes, even when I google things out, I type the URL in myself to avoid going through multiple redirects on google.com pages and to give me a clean copy-pasteable link right away.
That's because you were supposed to Ask Jeeves.
whew..
Being able to run an Adamant nature and still outspeeding most of the meta due to Sand Rush.
Half decent bulk with amazing defensive typing.
Multiple viable sets; you don't know if you're coming up against a defensive spinner or a juggernaut that can get to +2/+2 in one turn with Swords Dance.
Stab EQ with decent coverage.
"Good" is an understatement and a half.