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Ask HN: What collaborative whiteboard are you using?
I feel my team was way more productive when we all were whiteboarding together when designing new solutions.
Recently I have been day dreaming about VR whiteboards and tablet assisted whiteboards as I feel the tactile sense of a pen would help.
What are you using today?
- nikivi 6y agoI love https://excalidraw.com https://excalidraw.com Christopher Chedeau did a recent talk on nice challenges they had building it in the open https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fix2-SynPGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fix2-SynPGE I want to build a plugin for Figma to embed Excalidraw inside Figma as I use Figma for all my design work already.
- asdkhadsj 6y agoI like the look and UX of this, but I can't seem to draw on Safari. Anyone know a workaround?
- vjeux 6y agoCan you open an issue on github? It should work on both mobile and desktop Safari.
- arendtio 6y agoExcalidraw looks great. Sadly the Firefox support for Tablets is very poor. However, after switching to Chrome, everything worked as expected.
- swah 6y agoIt never ocurred to me that Excalidraw worked with tablets.
- meristem 6y agoThat would be great. (Also great--if I could chat with simultaneous collaborators in figma when we do not want to or cannot be in videoconf simultaneously (I do a lot of parallel design))
- nnain 6y agoLooks great! The UI is intuitive and so well laid out.
- murkle 6y agoThis seems very good: https://awwapp.com/ https://awwapp.com/
- senko 6y agoThanks! Cofounder here, happy to answer any questions. While AWW has been around for some time we've seen a big surge (~6x) in the past two months due to current situation (as did most online/collaborative tools). While AWW can be used directly on site, we also have an embeddable version, for example some interviewing startups use us as part of their web-based interviewing workflows. Edit to add: AWW was launched here almost 10 years ago as a hobby project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886353 It grew steadily over time and now profitably employs several people and is used by millions of people worldwide.
- mitchell_h 6y agoThank you! Seriously AWW is an awesome app.
- ykevinator 6y agoSecond, awwapp is awesome
- enitihas 6y agoYour story is very motivating and the website is very fast.
- xenocyon 6y agoWhat hardware do you use it with?
- aeonsky 6y agoThe second I'm presented with a pop-up as the first thing on a website, I close out.
- 6y ago
- iandanforth 6y agohttps://miro.com/ https://miro.com/ (previously realtimeboard.com)
- cygned 6y agoWe use Miro for backlog grooming and idea visualization. The Jira sync is very helpful for us.
- iandanforth 6y agoI've never used that feature. Can you describe your workflow for backlog grooming of Jira issues in Miro?
- cygned 6y agoSo what we do is importing Jira issues to a Miro board using the Miro Card for Jira plug-in. The development team orders them by difficulty/size horizontally. PO orders them by value vertically. We use that every couple sprints to visualize the overall shape of the backlog. Stories are updated from Miro directly, if necessary. We are currently thinking about keeping Jira issues permanently on a board and then update them, rather than pulling them in just for ordering
- taylodl 6y agoWe're using Miro for our Scrum of Scrums and it's working out quite well for us
- sethammons 6y agoWacom tablet and any shared canvas, usually Zoom’s. A colleague uses an ipad pro with a stylus.
- rubayeet 6y agoGoogle Jamboard + Wacom Intuos tablet with stylus [1] [1] https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-tablets/wacom-intuos https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-tablets/wacom-intuo...
- aaronharnly 6y agoWhich hardware are you using exactly? There are a lot of different price points; I’d love to find the cheapest that is still good enough to be useful.
- jacobn 6y agoWhile not the cheapest, we use it on iPad Pros with styluses - works pretty well.
- rubayeet 6y agoI’m using the one with Bluetooth support. You can go even cheaper by picking the USB only model.
- stan_rogers 6y agoAny of the low-end Wacom tablets would do the trick, and you don't need the current model. Previous to the move to "everything is an Intuos now (and the Intuos all become Intuos Pro because 'Pro')", that would have been the Bamboo Creative, and before that the Graphire. All of them are well more than good enough for the task at hand, and if you can pick up old stock (or used) cheaply, go for it. Note, though, that if you've never used a tablet before, it'll take a bit before your movements coordinate - I've always suggested trying to live as much as possible using the tablet in lieu of mouse or trackpad for about a week. Once you've got the knack, it's pretty much with you for life, but it's easy to give up in frustration when you're not used to absolute positioning that's remote from the screen until the moment it all just sort of clicks.
- aaronharnly 6y agoThank you!
- darkerside 6y agoOne by Wacom, with Autodesk sketch express. You can zoom share screen into the app, and it's much better than Zoom's native whiteboard function. Pressure sensitivity and functional pen buttons are so key.
- sixhobbits 6y agoI've been following the progress of https://room.sh https://room.sh and it looks really promising. Haven't used it much yet though.
- matdehaast 6y agoWe use room. Love it and the founders are super helpful if you run into issues
- a21y 6y agoroom.sh co-founder here. Thanks! :) We've got loads of cool stuff on the horizon so stay tuned. That being said, happy to answer any questions if anyone has any.
- lucasverra 6y agowhy should i create an account if i have mural ? ( no trolling, just observing the space)
- a21y 6y agoGreat question. Room's main differentiator between a lot of the other suggested products on this thread is that it's not just a collaborative whiteboard. It also includes collaborative document and code editors (and potentially more types of modules in the future). Room also has video chat built in, where the videos of the folks you're collaborating with hover around the workspace. Ultimately these attributes combine to make room.sh a cleaner and easier alternative to cobbling together some combination of Zoom, Google Docs, and Figma (to use some prominent examples) for your team. Also, you don't even need to create an account to try it out! We'd love if you gave it a whirl and left us some feedback in the box in our navbar :)
- AlexITC 6y agoAs a suggestion, the website allows you to type a room name, which opens a new tab and asks you for the room name again, certainly the second step could be avoided.
- iso1631 6y agoI use a real whiteboard on my wall in shot of the camera
- pmiller2 6y agoI'm surprised I had to scroll down so far to see this. You could distribute individual whiteboards to every engineer, and even have a dedicated webcam/tripod setup, for next to nothing. It's not "collaborative" in the sense that remote people can erase stuff on your board, but, I don't think that's a big deal. The "erase API" just becomes "Hey, @iso1631, why don't we get rid of X and replace it with Y?" I suppose if you wanted to try and automate it, you could do so pretty easily with some custom software that just overlays photos of all the boards. The amount of image processing would be pretty trivial.
- iso1631 6y agoNormally when we whiteboard we just have one person at the controls anyway
- matco11 6y agoMiro.com is great. It is so much more than a whiteboard. We use it for brainstorm sessions, retros and all sort of things.
- wortelefant 6y agoMural.co - other than miro, it allows unlimited anonymous co-editing without a need to sihn on. Since we use it only occasionally, we just have a single facilitator account for the team
- oso2k 6y agoI've used Mural.co quite successfully as well. I think we probably bought an enterprise license. Collaborative, full-featured, almost as good as a whiteboard/butcher paper and a tall stack of stickie notes.
- wortelefant 6y agoI experienced two longer outages though in the last momth, both times during workshops. I'm keeping screenshpts on a google slides deck as a backup for the more important events at least until the growth pains have subsided.
- tyingq 6y agoMural's MS Teams integration looks pretty good too. I imagine they will get a fair amount of sales based on that.
- aaronharnly 6y agoI’d love to hear what hardware people are using. I’m looking at buying hardware for some of our team, but obviously woild like to find the right cost/quality ratio.
- finaliteration 6y agoI’ve been using a Wacom Intuos S combined with Microsoft Whiteboard. The Intuos wasn’t outrageously expensive and has been working really well for my needs (mostly just process and class diagrams during online architecture discussions).
- aaronharnly 6y agoThank you!
- zubairq 6y agoMural, jam board and lucid charts
- rvivek 6y agoI love excalidraw.com A quick shoutout to our service, we embedded excalidraw in our pair programming solution that helps you do system design interviews effectively: https://www.hackerrank.com/products/codepair/ https://www.hackerrank.com/products/codepair/
- eddyg 6y agoIndeed. Excalidraw is really good... has an end-to-end encrypted collaboration mode... and is MIT-licensed. https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw
- 4di 6y agoI heard about it from the React community on Twitter and I've been using it exclusively for system design interviews. I love the look of 'whoa cool' when candidates see my cursor moving around the screen :)
- fblp 6y agoWhich whiteboard apps have the best integrations? I've been trying to find one that can 2-way sync with fields in airtable so that i can build a dynamic org chart.
- anairs 6y agoHands down Miro has been a great tool for.What I really liked about Miro is that it has a desktop app which makes it really snappy, its simple and intuitive to use and has great collaboration features (stickies, comments, notes etc.) hope that helps
- andrethegiant 6y ago+1 for Miro. It's truly an impressive piece of work.
- sidcool 6y agoMural
- karaterobot 6y agoFigma. It's not all that useful for actually mimicking a whiteboard, in the sense of drawing arbitrary shapes with a pen. It has a pencil tool, but it's not great. Fortunately, most of what we do is drawing rectangles with text in them and lines between them, and it's pretty good at that. Plus, it supports undo with cmd-z, which most whiteboard apps don't seem to.
- thingsilearned 6y ago+1 here. Figma's collaboration features are also just incredible so many people can participate simultaneously, and make copies w/ their own versions. We've got ours also well setup with a big library of assets like buttons, and illustrations we've had made, and different example charts, so if what you're discussing is a new feature or landing page it's really easy to drag in a bunch of ready-made components to express your idea.
- paulsutter 6y ago+1 find us using figma more and more for general collaborative work and not just design
- rock_hard 6y ago+1 We use Figma for collaborative whiteboard if too It’s the best collaborative canvas you will find in 2020 IMO I would even go so far as to say it’s the first digital whiteboard I have used in 20+ years that’s actually better than a real whiteboard
- sixdimensional 6y agoPrior HN on shared whiteboards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22675247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22675247
- yachay 6y agoI've been using excalidraw.com
- ldiracdelta 6y agoAn engineer has a problem. So he says to himself, "I'll use a remote-enabled auto-capturing whiteboard." Now he has two problems.
- jpallen 6y agohttps://www.ideaflip.com https://www.ideaflip.com - it's nice and simple compared to e.g. Miro, and nicely recreates the offline collaboration feeling of working around a whiteboard
- wajsbrot 6y agohttps://app.scratchwork.io/ https://app.scratchwork.io/ is a simple collaborative dashboard and support writing math equations by hand or with latex. Nice for researchers or engineers.
- jtolds 6y agoHere's the best set up I've used so far: 1) Get the cheapest iPad that supports the Apple Pencil. The 2018 non-Pro was this for me last I looked. 2) Get the Google Jamboard app (not the Jamboard hardware, it is not at all worth it). 3) Share the "jam" with yourself on a different device (a nearby laptop) 4) Screenshare the laptop. Things I think any virtual whiteboard scheme needs to have: 1) You need to be able to see people's faces! If you can't see the people in the video call, good luck having anything feel natural. 2) See #1 again. Having the laptop drive the video call is important so you can configure it to see everyone's face while you present. 3) being able to use a pen to write and a finger to erase (if you have to open a menu, fail. sadly the jamboard app also gets this wrong though their way overpriced hardware gets it right) 4) ideally you have the ability to have an infinitely scrolling whiteboard. Jamboard doesn't do this, but it's close. The Jamboard app also works on phones so other people can fairly easily join in and contribute. This scheme has its problems, but holy crap, so many whiteboard apps focus way too much on fancy new widgets and shapes and text and whatever and not enough on getting out of the way.
- ryanmarsh 6y agoIf you're a trainer this is the go to flipchart solution for remote. It's also great for facilitating group activities during class.
- xnx 6y agoI love this type of practical solution that gets most of the benefit for a tiny fraction of the cost.
- twinge 6y agoIf you have a Mac, you can connect the iPad to it and share the contents of the screen directly (via QuickTime). The latency is lower and you can share drawings outside Jamboard. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/26/tip-record-your-ipads-screen-on-your-mac-with-quicktime-player https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/26/tip-record-your-i...
- jtolds 6y ago
- taylodl 6y agoI have a team using IdeaBoardz (https://ideaboardz.com https://ideaboardz.com). Our Scrum of Scrums is using Miro (https://miro.com https://miro.com). Miro is more full-featured, but IdeaBoardz is easier to use.
- ivankuz 6y agoVery honorable mention to this topic would be https://www.ryeboard.com/ https://www.ryeboard.com/. They're moving quite fast and seemingly in the right direction.
- sayeedroshan 6y agodfxgchjklm;,.
- sayeedroshan 6y agosayeeed
- ryanmarsh 6y agoRemote training I've found Google Jamboard has the right mix of features and ease of use for collaborative exercises during training. Everything else I've introduced a few enterprise clients to Miro and they're running with it. I've been impressed with how they've employed it.
- nojito 6y agoMicrosoft Whiteboard is pretty phenomenal for collaborative white boarding https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-whiteboard/digital-whiteboard-app https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-whit...
- NicoJuicy 6y agoI wished they made PC version on par with the school's edition though :( . It would be much more usefull for event-storming.
- DesignGuy85 6y agoFreehand by InVision is great! Very simple and intuitive. http://freehand.new http://freehand.new
- davefp 6y agoSeconding Freehand.
- news_to_me 6y agoIf you have an Apple Pencil, I made https://whiteboard.zjm.me/ https://whiteboard.zjm.me/ as a collaborative whiteboard tool. (It also supports mouse, but a stylus is way better.)
- pbsurf 6y agoSeems to be the only one here with real stylus support - pressure sensitivity and draw with pen, pan with finger. Very nice!
- dharma1 6y agoAny video conferencing tool + cheap wacom + Figma is quite powerful. Works on MacOS/Linux/Windows. There are some things Figma isn't intended (and as such very good fit) for though, like diagramming/flowcharts, or marking up PDF's - haven't found great multiplayer web apps for those. Feels like concurrent multiuser editing is something that a lot of software would benefit from - maybe something we will look back in 5 years as being weird it didn't exist and we had to send files back and forth to work on something together. Would make working together on almost anything easier remotely. Miro and Mural are also quite nice collab tools, more limited than Figma but some nice things out of the box.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- justincormack 6y agoI am using small (A4) physical whiteboards with an Ipevo v4k camera pointing at them. Its not quite the same, but I do like having a physical board. And its cheap compared to an ipad+pencil.
- atentaten 6y ago+1 for Miro
- screye 6y agoI use MSFT whiteboard with my surface pro 7 and share it over teams. (teams also has a whiteboard tool, but for some reason it is very clunky) If it doesn't have to be collaborative, then I use Onenote, because the scribbles can be saved as meeting notes. It helps that I work at MSFT and everyone uses Windows + has whiteboard installed.
- s1mon 6y agoOneNote can be collaborative. It also runs reasonably well on an iPad with Apple Pencil. I used this combo for a remote meeting recently while we were all on teams for audio. Some people were using OneNote on Windows and drawing with a mouse. There was occasional sync/lag issues, but I will certainly try it again. The Teams Whiteboard is pretty bad, and clunky to get to in the middle of a meeting. Most Teams users don't even know it's there. As others have mentioned the ideal solution would have an easy way to point at things on the whiteboard. The lack of a hover state on touch based systems makes this more tricky, but there can, of course, be a pointer tool.
- screye 6y ago> OneNote can be collaborative I have moved to it last week. Let's see how it goes. I love how convenient it is that my natural brainstorming serves as detailed meeting notes. > easy way to point at things on the whiteboard I use whiteboard on my surface, and then project my screen instead of starting whiteboard from team. That way I can point at stuff, but it is harder to be collaborative.
- jacquesm 6y agoIf you're into Obeya and/or Agile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obeya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obeya Then check out Iobeya: https://www.iobeya.com/ https://www.iobeya.com/ Does one thing and does it very well.
- egyptish 6y agoInVision's Freehand has developed leaps and bounds over the last month - it integrates with our MS Teams so it was easy to use and jump into. Also comes with a presentation mode so you can walk through designs and have others on it follow along. Compatible with iPad and Apple Pencil, which I recommend over the browser for markups.
- uzername 6y agoOur team's have been using Miro for this kind of collaboration. I was surprised that it felt better than using a whiteboard in person, because the cost of changing the already drawn boxes and arrows went way down. For more technical whiteboards, I've been using excalidraw. I like presenting the "drawn" look to help imply that this is an unfinished idea and we're sketching the concepts out.
- facorreia 6y agoMiro works great for us as well. It's particularly good that multiple people can edit at the same time. It's pretty fast and we reuse the notes across sessions.
- lovasoa 6y agoI recommend WBO : https://wbo.ophir.dev/ https://wbo.ophir.dev/ I am the main developer, and I have been maintaining and using it for several years now. Some of its advantages : - It is fully open-source, free, and without advertisement. You can easily deploy it to your own server. - All the whiteboards have an infinite size. - It is fully web-based, you can use it without installing anything, even on relatively old browsers. - It's translated in several languages. - It's actively developed. In-development features include image upload, element resizing, new tools, and others...
- talmr 6y agoThat's really cool :D
- AlexITC 6y agoThanks for sharing, looks interesting. By the way, for some reason I have problems scrolling with the trackpad as it scrolls very slowly, while scrolling with the arrow keys works just fine.
- lovasoa 6y agoYou're welcome. Yes, scroll amounts are not consistent between browsers, and we haven't implemented anything yet to work around that. I've opened a github issue to track the problem.
- davidwitt415 6y agoI've been using MURAL, Miro and Figma. MURAL and Miro are pretty close, and each has it's strengths, but I prefer MURAL. For a team that doesn't need the bells and whistles, Figma is a great choice.
- prando 6y agoOne of the main criteria for a whiteboard is to use it with a stylus - so I purchased https://air.bar/ https://air.bar/ to turn my non-touch-screen laptop into a touch-screen-one. However, its latency is not low enough to provide a smooth experience. Does anyone know of a good digital pen that plays well with Win 10. I suspect our company policies won't allow me to share screen via an iPad.
- toddmoy 6y agoFor whiteboarding, I prefer Whimsical (whimical.co) over Figma or Mural. It's focused on digramming, wireframing, and mind-mapping; it's an absolute joy to use. Blazing fast, simple, and stays out of your way. For context, I spend much of my day designing in Figma, which I love as well, but not for whiteboard-style collaboration.
- austinking 6y agoOur company was stuggling to conduct remote interviews, so I made a shared whiteboard tool to help out. Great for team collaboration as well. You can generate as many unique boards for free as you want here: https://interviewboard.io https://interviewboard.io
- AlexITC 6y agoI feel you, I created another tool which has helped me on system design interviews: https://collabuml.com https://collabuml.com, hopefully you will find it helpful.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vivster7 6y agoIts still very much in development, but we're building https://whiteboard.systems/ https://whiteboard.systems/ Its based on the idea that for most system diagrams, you just need boxes, text and arrows. everything else is superfluous. Its collaborative by default so you can invite someone to join you with the URL. The tools aren't discoverable yet, so to use it: - option(⌥) + click to create a box - option(⌥) + drag to create a grouping box - select a box and option(⌥) + click another to draw an arrow - select a box and type to edit text would very much appreciate feedback! (email in profile)
- rckoepke 6y agoAs you requested feedback, it's dead simple and I like that. Speed and low friction is super useful in a lot of situations. I have just some "bugs" I guess (Windows Chrome): - Can only add text to a box immediately after selecting it. Move it first, then cannot add text. Probably should be a blinking insert symbol to indicate when you can edit text or not, as this would at minimum make the state "discoverable". Personally I feel a lot of people will try to double click to edit text. - Backspace deletes boxes but "delete" does not.
- vivster7 6y agoappreciate the feedback. we fixed a bug so text should always be editable if the box is selected. and the "delete" key should also work now. agree the blinking cursor is the standard for indicating if something is text editable. Its proven a bit tricky to get right, but hopefully, we'll have it working soon.
- thecatwentup 6y agoLooks and feels pretty solid. I would recommend changing the document title, as it still reads "React App"
- RussianCow 6y agoVery minor, but it would be great if it changed "option" to "alt" for users that aren't on macOS. Otherwise, looks cool!
- 6y ago
- irskep 6y agoI started building my own with a friend because nothing else had what I wanted (great freehand drawing and text tools) and was cheap. We've only just finished the MVP, so feedback would be very helpful! https://browserboard.com/ https://browserboard.com/ I have no idea if it'll hold up under load, I guess let's see. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You can share the URL to collaborate with someone else.
- aphit 6y agoWorth noting a few updates ago Excalidraw included in freehand drawing with the Freedraw tool (X or 7, as of writing).
- zenhack 6y agoNeat; simple but I like it. One concrete thing that jumps out at me as I play around with it: I keep instinctively trying to hit Ctrl+Z to undo, which doesn't work (and then I remember there's a button). Might be nice to make that shortcut work. Also: I enjoyed this: > No BS > Browserboard is written by two people in their spare time who aren’t thirsty for advertising dollars. We have no reason to spam you or violate your privacy. A thought: any interest in porting to Sandstorm? It seems like the app would be a perfect fit, and giving people an easy way to run it themselves gives you an out if it gets too popular for you to keep running it for free. If you're not familiar: https://sandstorm.io https://sandstorm.io Relevant blog post: https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require-federated-hosting https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-re... (Disclosure: I am one of the more active contributors to Sandstorm)
- eugenekolo 6y agoGoogle Slides and share desktop on Zoom. No need to complicate it with yet another piece of software. Powerpoint and Slides are perfectly capable for drawing diagrams, or whiteboarding. Zoom screen share is low enough latency and you're already using it for voice comm.
- filipn 6y agoWe've been trying different tools, and we've found Excalidraw (https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/) to be satisfying our needs. It's relatively new and albeit it's lacking a few features, it has proven really good for drawing diagrams and designing new solutions like ui mockups and stuff like that.
- foobaw 6y agoDidn't know there were so many options!
- pbsurf 6y agoI've added shared whiteboarding to my handwriting app: http://styluslabs.com/share http://styluslabs.com/share It is possible to deploy your own server.
- dublin 6y agoShared whiteboards and a good audio connection are FAR more important than most videoconferencing solutions. Microsoft's Surface line kicks Apple's iPads around the block here, at least partly because the Surface "pen" has a built-in "eraser", but Apple's "pencil" doesn't. Windows Whiteboard is a pretty decent starter solution here, and runs on both Windows and iOS. Run in conjunction with Zoom or Teams, it's a pretty darn usable setup.
- trenchgun 6y agoThis is good: https://app.mural.co/ https://app.mural.co/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mwdalrymple 6y agoLucidchart is amazing - love the simultaneous editing. Its the best thing that I have come across for collaborative whiteboarding. It also has great integration with Confluence.
- Cactus2018 6y agoOsmo "base + reflector" for iPad, a document camera "whiteboard" for video conference. >> I don’t want to look like promotional, but recently a professor used an Osmo reflector (https://twitter.com/romps/status/1237617042338897921?s=12 https://twitter.com/romps/status/1237617042338897921?s=12) to project class notes and it caught on with teachers. >> A team worked through the weekend and released a free app to make this super easy (https://twitter.com/PlayOsmo/status/1241152565083090947 https://twitter.com/PlayOsmo/status/1241152565083090947). >> While the base + reflector is not free, if you already have an Osmo game at home, you can reuse that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22660301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22660301
- jtolds 6y agooh this is actually really good and it's just a $10 mirror! you can see the people you're presenting to, and while they can't see your face, they can see what you're writing. what a neat idea
- iameoghan 6y agoAnother +1 for Miro. Super simple & intuitive. For my needs, I can get by on the free version which is great.
- gautamdivgi 6y agoI use a Wacom tablet (the cheapest one works well). I can use sketchbook (came with the Wacom tablet) when I want to diagram spontaneously in meetings. But having people edit my sketches is a challenge since no one has the same setup.
- NullError 6y agoMiro! Its a company changing tool!
- NullError 6y agoWe use MIRO and it has changed the entire company culture. We have 5 international offices, and with micro, it allows everyone to have full transparency with what other offices and teams are working. It is now the 2nd most important tool beside Slack. (400+ Employees)
- nhorob67 6y agoI heard about a whiteboard app that has fading gestures that were highly reviewed. Does anyone know which app has these?
- AlexITC 6y agoWhile I don't use it daily, I built https://collabuml.com https://collabuml.com (launched on HN a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955971) which has been helpful for me, I made it this way as lots of time you mostly care about writing system diagrams instead of freestyle whiteboard.
- dezzeus 6y agoAmong the free ones there’s https://drawpile.net/ https://drawpile.net/ but I haven’t tried it yet…
- agrafix 6y agoWe noticed that most whiteboarding apps out there over-focused on perfect diagrams, so a lot of time in meetings is lost due to rearranging boxes and arrows. Hence, we built https://letsboard.co https://letsboard.co - a very simple collaborative whiteboarding tool and are using it daily now.
- montroser 6y agoWe recently moved from Miro to https://beta.plectica.com https://beta.plectica.com and have been loving it. So much better than anything else we tried at handling hierarchy (nested lists, sections, etc)
- SimianLogic2 6y agoMy mom is a retired teacher, and she's been doing remote preK for my 5yo and my niece for a couple of hours a day so the grownups can get work done. Evaluating whiteboards for a 60-year-old and two 5-year-olds to use together with video chat was.... not super fun. What we've settled on: We do the video chat on an old fullscreen iMac we had lying around. My mom and each kid all have their own iPads. For the first couple of weeks we used a webwhiteboard, but the littles were having a LOT of trouble with it. It's not optimized for iPads. It's easy to click on links in the nav. Different size screens see different regions of the whiteboard. My niece and son kept clearing each other's work and causing fights. I ended up building a little prototype for them with rails/websockets that tried to solve all the dumb stuff that makes it hard to use it on iPads. Apple really doesn't make it easy, though. You can bookmark a page to your homescreen to get rid of the Safari chrome (URL bar is the worst for 5yos), but then you can't have cookies and regular usage (maybe just while fullscreen?) will prompt you that the webpage is trying to steal your passwords (fake keyboard warning). Guided access gets rid of most of the obnoxious gestures they were triggering by accident. I disabled most of the multi-touch events in javascript. I fixed the board size with selectable orientation (portrait/landscape) and set it to scale + aspect-fits to everyone's device. I added a simple host/guest permission model so my mom has a few teacher permissions that the kids don't have. She can either be in teacher mode (she can draw/clear, they can't), class mode (anyone can draw/clear), or student mode where each kid gets their own private board that she can swap between (she can still draw/clear on student boards). I was starting to work on more teaching features -- the ability for her to save/load sketches so she could do lesson plans ahead of time, the ability for her to "broadcast" saved boards to the student boards so she could make assignments for each 5yo to fill out. We had kind of a rough stretch where one of the kids or the other would forget their tablet for about a week, though, and my mom got fed up and just ordered them workbooks for all 3 of them that they could do together. It's still running on Heroku, but I haven't been working on it much lately. http://yiayiaboard.herokuapp.com/rooms/sLZqbw2KHWi http://yiayiaboard.herokuapp.com/rooms/sLZqbw2KHWi I think this is the right model for small-class whiteboards, but I think you'd have to build a native solution to make it usable for kids that small. When it worked, it was pretty magical!
- demosthenex 6y agoRecently I've been using Openboard (http://openboard.ch/ http://openboard.ch/) while screensharing. Yes its not a team board, but at least it's local. It helps me explain concepts to others easily.
- me_me_me 6y agoI have tried few of them, but what I find most infuriating is the lack of keyboard shortcuts. Usually they support only C+z for undo. Switching between pen and eraser by having to actually click an icon is fine on iPad but it drives me up the wall when I am using wacom tablet and keyboard. Does anyone know application that supports keyboard shortcuts?
- greenfiddlefig 6y agoWe've been LOVING Sprink (trysprink.com) and it's free! Compared to Miro which we previously used, the interface was much easier for our team. Plus there's no setup required which is a huge bonus when you want to quickly share a board and still video/audio call.
- mikecoles 6y agoOBS (Open Broadcaster Software) - Provides the screens/windows to the conf call as well as your camera shot. Gromit-MPX - Allows drawing overtop whatever screen/window you'd like. Wacom Intuous - Much nicer to draw with than a mouse or finger. https://obsproject.com/ https://obsproject.com/ https://github.com/bk138/gromit-mpx https://github.com/bk138/gromit-mpx https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-tablets/wacom-intuos https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-tablets/wacom-intuo...