5 ms·

Here'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 G

by jtolds 6y ago

Here'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 ago
If 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 ago
I love this type of practical solution that gets most of the benefit for a tiny fraction of the cost.
twinge 6y ago
If 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
  That might fix the finger erase issue but that makes collaborative whiteboarding harder maybe.
- jiveturkey 6y ago
  you no longer have to connect via wire. you can remote the ipad screen via quicktime, over LAN.
  - f0rmatfunction 6y ago
    Really? I use QuickTime for screen recording all the time, I've never been able to do it over LAN. Just tried it now and the iPad only shows up as a video source when plugged in. Are you sure you're not thinking of SideCar?
    - jiveturkey 6y ago
      maybe we're both right. i was wrong, you can't connect directly over LAN to an iPad. i was thinking of a different use case with ATV -- somewhere around 2018 you could install MDM profiles over LAN instead of USB. but you can still do it wirelessly, if you have an ATV. use airplay to project the iPad screen to the ATV. pair your mac with the ATV. after pairing, your mac can record over LAN from the ATV, where you are projecting your iPad. tried it just now and it works with the slight deficit that you get a TV-sized image, with borders, instead of the iPad-sized image. from Apple docs, it seems like any generation ATV will work, so if you're doing this just for iPad screen sharing, it may still be worth the effort if you pick up a 3rd gen ATV for $30 on ebay. some apple cables cost more than that!
cma 6y ago
One thing apple pencil is missing is hover. In a collaborative whiteboard you want to be able to quickly point to things without marking (can solve with a button for it, but it isn't as natural).
- jtolds 6y ago
  huh, i didn't realize i was missing this and now i miss it. that said, it's usually not too bad to underline and then click "undo" (which is what i have been doing since i didn't know what i was missing)
  - gfxgirl 6y ago
    If you're on a collaborative whiteboard does undo undo the last collective edit or just your own edits?
    - irskep 6y ago
      The way we handle it in Browserboard is to only undo your own edits. We version each individual shape, and filter events out of the undo stack for shapes that have been touched by other users.
    - jtolds 6y ago
      I suppose Google Docs has trained me to be surprised if my ctrl-Z undoes someone else's edit. I haven't noticed wondering about this before though so perhaps I just haven't hit this case? It's a great question.
melvinroest 6y ago
Checkout doodledocs.com -- no account creation needed, front-end app only (it doesn't always work behind corporate wifi) It's nowhere near perfect, but it's open source and I'm open to any collaboration on it for fun (even a complete rewrite, I'm not a fan of EmberJS. I explored EmberJS with it). I'm currently noticing an eraser bug when you are in draw mode and they are in eraser mode (d'oh). I didn't know Jamboard existed when I made it. But I made it because I didn't find any app that applies pressure sensitivity and it's quite simple to do (TL;DR modern browsers support pressure sensitivity). You can also annotate websites with it. Though, I didn't get the collaborative aspects of that working. My focus was on the question "what if websites are like paper?" And I ran with it for a month, while exploring EmberJS. For that reason, I don't have an undo, but simply an eraser. It's also why the default style is pencil / pressure-sensitive based (you can have a more pen-like style though). Its main use cases that I use it for are: - Learning how to draw by tracing images. - Brainstorming / whiteboarding (empty board) - Brainstorming / whiteboarding (image loaded via URL) - Draw over websites (mostly for annotation / having margins to write on) I'm curious to know what you think of it. People can also use an MS Surface or Wacom by the way.
- bmiller2 6y ago
  Just curious, What’s not to like about ember?
  - melvinroest 6y ago
    It's not a framework optimized for canvas. Since this project is mostly based on HTML canvas, it doesn't jive well.
- egfx 6y ago
  It’s not exactly mobile friendly. You should direct mobile users to use this on their desktop with some kind of alert.
  - melvinroest 6y ago
    That is a really good tip! Thanks :)
jtolds 6y ago
To elaborate on my last sentence more, whiteboarding is about trying to think! I'm trying to diagram thoughts out for people. The last thing I want to do in the middle of my thoughts is have to stop the thought to futz around with menus or keyboard shortcuts to remember how to open a box or a widget or some shape or whatever. That's a guaranteed interruption every few seconds. Computers are great and can do new things, but for whiteboarding specifically it's unclear to me why so few whiteboard apps seem to get it that their primary goal is to be invisible and get out of the way.
jiveturkey 6y ago
If using Google Meet (we do internally): 1) ditto 2) join meeting from ipad (in addition to camera/mic device) 3) present screen from ipad Then you can use any pencil app you like. I use one called "Coloring" that my kid uses. It's really simple and doesn't get in the way. I presume the same would work for any other videoconf tool, eg zoom. The benefit over your method is that you still have the additional headshot view, since you're joined to the meeting twice. Can the jam app not join a google meet "natively"? It's not collaborative, in that any other participant can edit the drawing, so it doesn't answer the originally posed question. But I've found that for the most part, even in person, just one person really "drives" the whiteboard. With the tiny screen size afforded over video, you aren't really going to benefit much from having multiple people be able to edit anyway. For that kind of collaboration you really need 2-3 6' wide whiteboards in a large room. I feel the benefit of having a second, independently presenting device for the whiteboard, while still being able to participate with your talking head view, outweighs (by far) the downside of only one editor.
- jtolds 6y ago
  the jam app used to be able to join google meets natively but when i checked most recently it appears they removed that feature :( strong agree on having an independent device for whiteboarding so you can see heads is more important than the collaborative part, if you had to pick one. so much context is provided in seeing if heads are nodding or looking confused
  - jiveturkey 6y ago
    just looked into this and can confirm, jam cannot join a meet "natively". but it is close enough. just use the google meet app from the iPad, and share the iPad screen from within Meet. it's the method i outlined, just with the jam app instead of 'Coloring'. even without google meet on the iPad, the share-to-yourself and then share screen is unnecessary. create a new jam, join that jam from laptop and iPad, and share the jam from your laptop. this seems easier to me, but ymmv. https://allthings.how/how-to-use-jamboard-in-google-meet/ https://allthings.how/how-to-use-jamboard-in-google-meet/ should also work with any other videoconf app. i assume they all allow screen share. i really enjoy this method much better, because now in Catalina the screen recording permission is a distinct capability. I only enable that for Chrome when I explicitly need to share the screen. Setting those kinds of capabilities is not automatable, so it's a self-imposed annoyance, but worth it for the security gain. People really underappreciate the improved security of Catalina, perhaps justifiably so due to the other craptasticness of it. When you enable this in prefs, it says you have to restart chrome for it to take effect. However, you don't. The permission takes effect dynamically. Probably because each tab is a new process in Chrome, so it is in effect "restarting". for vc apps that have their own app, this is great compartmentalization for the screen recording permission. for vc that runs in the browser, the tradeoff is you have to give the entire browser screen recording permission. this is too vast of a permission. of course with a native app you then have the zoom-malware problem. sigh.
wildrhythms 6y ago
OMG this is my exact setup. I bought an iPad Pro a year ago and figured might as well get the fancy pencil with it... it's by far the best tech purchase I've made in a long time. I use this device every day. The Jamboard app especially is great because I can join the same link from a laptop and present my drawing over HDMI. Jamboard pro tip: if you open the "board switcher" drawer and press the three dots, you can change the background to grid or dot paper. Game changer for sketching diagrams. Another great app for drawing is Procreate, which gives me layers, and has better drawing tools, like morphing my crooked lines into straight lines and perfect circles. Nice for sketching interfaces.
- jtolds 6y ago
  i spent a long time researching various writing devices, such as the reMarkable, the microsoft surface, the ipads, wacom, etc., and the ipad (in my case, the non-pro) at the time at least really had the best ratio of pixel latency to price. it really wasn't even a competition. writing on an android with slow pixel latency or something is really jarring, but yeah, the apple pencil setup is truly great.
  - Scipio_Afri 6y ago
    What makes an ipad with the pen better than a microsoft surface book or surface pro? I'm looking at buying pro 7 or book 3 for taking notes in onenote and whiteboarding.. so these is definitely a relevant post to me.
    - jtolds 6y ago
      I haven't looked into it recently but yeah, like I said I was trying to find the sweet spot with pen latency and price. The iPad was cheap (~$350) and had great pen latency, whereas the reMarkable was not cheap or as full featured, and the Surface was also not as cheap and had reports of bad pen latency (e.g., see https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/e8kho9/if_there_is_no_way_to_improve_pen_latency_will/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/e8kho9/if_there_is... for an example) Update: It appears the situation has improved across the board. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-remarkable-2-is-an-ipad-pro-for-writers-and-other-professionals https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-remarkable-2-is-an-ipad-p... says 20-21ms is pretty standard now.

by jtolds 6y ago

ryanmarsh 6y ago

If 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 ago

I love this type of practical solution that gets most of the benefit for a tiny fraction of the cost.

twinge 6y ago

If 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
That might fix the finger erase issue but that makes collaborative whiteboarding harder maybe.
jiveturkey 6y ago
you no longer have to connect via wire. you can remote the ipad screen via quicktime, over LAN.
- f0rmatfunction 6y ago
  Really? I use QuickTime for screen recording all the time, I've never been able to do it over LAN. Just tried it now and the iPad only shows up as a video source when plugged in. Are you sure you're not thinking of SideCar?
  - jiveturkey 6y ago
    maybe we're both right. i was wrong, you can't connect directly over LAN to an iPad. i was thinking of a different use case with ATV -- somewhere around 2018 you could install MDM profiles over LAN instead of USB. but you can still do it wirelessly, if you have an ATV. use airplay to project the iPad screen to the ATV. pair your mac with the ATV. after pairing, your mac can record over LAN from the ATV, where you are projecting your iPad. tried it just now and it works with the slight deficit that you get a TV-sized image, with borders, instead of the iPad-sized image. from Apple docs, it seems like any generation ATV will work, so if you're doing this just for iPad screen sharing, it may still be worth the effort if you pick up a 3rd gen ATV for $30 on ebay. some apple cables cost more than that!

cma 6y ago

One thing apple pencil is missing is hover. In a collaborative whiteboard you want to be able to quickly point to things without marking (can solve with a button for it, but it isn't as natural).

jtolds 6y ago
huh, i didn't realize i was missing this and now i miss it. that said, it's usually not too bad to underline and then click "undo" (which is what i have been doing since i didn't know what i was missing)
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  If you're on a collaborative whiteboard does undo undo the last collective edit or just your own edits?
  - irskep 6y ago
    The way we handle it in Browserboard is to only undo your own edits. We version each individual shape, and filter events out of the undo stack for shapes that have been touched by other users.
  - jtolds 6y ago
    I suppose Google Docs has trained me to be surprised if my ctrl-Z undoes someone else's edit. I haven't noticed wondering about this before though so perhaps I just haven't hit this case? It's a great question.

melvinroest 6y ago

Checkout doodledocs.com -- no account creation needed, front-end app only (it doesn't always work behind corporate wifi) It's nowhere near perfect, but it's open source and I'm open to any collaboration on it for fun (even a complete rewrite, I'm not a fan of EmberJS. I explored EmberJS with it). I'm currently noticing an eraser bug when you are in draw mode and they are in eraser mode (d'oh). I didn't know Jamboard existed when I made it. But I made it because I didn't find any app that applies pressure sensitivity and it's quite simple to do (TL;DR modern browsers support pressure sensitivity). You can also annotate websites with it. Though, I didn't get the collaborative aspects of that working. My focus was on the question "what if websites are like paper?" And I ran with it for a month, while exploring EmberJS. For that reason, I don't have an undo, but simply an eraser. It's also why the default style is pencil / pressure-sensitive based (you can have a more pen-like style though). Its main use cases that I use it for are: - Learning how to draw by tracing images. - Brainstorming / whiteboarding (empty board) - Brainstorming / whiteboarding (image loaded via URL) - Draw over websites (mostly for annotation / having margins to write on) I'm curious to know what you think of it. People can also use an MS Surface or Wacom by the way.

bmiller2 6y ago
Just curious, What’s not to like about ember?
- melvinroest 6y ago
  It's not a framework optimized for canvas. Since this project is mostly based on HTML canvas, it doesn't jive well.
egfx 6y ago
It’s not exactly mobile friendly. You should direct mobile users to use this on their desktop with some kind of alert.
- melvinroest 6y ago
  That is a really good tip! Thanks :)

jtolds 6y ago

To elaborate on my last sentence more, whiteboarding is about trying to think! I'm trying to diagram thoughts out for people. The last thing I want to do in the middle of my thoughts is have to stop the thought to futz around with menus or keyboard shortcuts to remember how to open a box or a widget or some shape or whatever. That's a guaranteed interruption every few seconds. Computers are great and can do new things, but for whiteboarding specifically it's unclear to me why so few whiteboard apps seem to get it that their primary goal is to be invisible and get out of the way.

jiveturkey 6y ago

If using Google Meet (we do internally): 1) ditto 2) join meeting from ipad (in addition to camera/mic device) 3) present screen from ipad Then you can use any pencil app you like. I use one called "Coloring" that my kid uses. It's really simple and doesn't get in the way. I presume the same would work for any other videoconf tool, eg zoom. The benefit over your method is that you still have the additional headshot view, since you're joined to the meeting twice. Can the jam app not join a google meet "natively"? It's not collaborative, in that any other participant can edit the drawing, so it doesn't answer the originally posed question. But I've found that for the most part, even in person, just one person really "drives" the whiteboard. With the tiny screen size afforded over video, you aren't really going to benefit much from having multiple people be able to edit anyway. For that kind of collaboration you really need 2-3 6' wide whiteboards in a large room. I feel the benefit of having a second, independently presenting device for the whiteboard, while still being able to participate with your talking head view, outweighs (by far) the downside of only one editor.

jtolds 6y ago
the jam app used to be able to join google meets natively but when i checked most recently it appears they removed that feature :( strong agree on having an independent device for whiteboarding so you can see heads is more important than the collaborative part, if you had to pick one. so much context is provided in seeing if heads are nodding or looking confused
- jiveturkey 6y ago
  just looked into this and can confirm, jam cannot join a meet "natively". but it is close enough. just use the google meet app from the iPad, and share the iPad screen from within Meet. it's the method i outlined, just with the jam app instead of 'Coloring'. even without google meet on the iPad, the share-to-yourself and then share screen is unnecessary. create a new jam, join that jam from laptop and iPad, and share the jam from your laptop. this seems easier to me, but ymmv. https://allthings.how/how-to-use-jamboard-in-google-meet/ https://allthings.how/how-to-use-jamboard-in-google-meet/ should also work with any other videoconf app. i assume they all allow screen share. i really enjoy this method much better, because now in Catalina the screen recording permission is a distinct capability. I only enable that for Chrome when I explicitly need to share the screen. Setting those kinds of capabilities is not automatable, so it's a self-imposed annoyance, but worth it for the security gain. People really underappreciate the improved security of Catalina, perhaps justifiably so due to the other craptasticness of it. When you enable this in prefs, it says you have to restart chrome for it to take effect. However, you don't. The permission takes effect dynamically. Probably because each tab is a new process in Chrome, so it is in effect "restarting". for vc apps that have their own app, this is great compartmentalization for the screen recording permission. for vc that runs in the browser, the tradeoff is you have to give the entire browser screen recording permission. this is too vast of a permission. of course with a native app you then have the zoom-malware problem. sigh.

wildrhythms 6y ago

OMG this is my exact setup. I bought an iPad Pro a year ago and figured might as well get the fancy pencil with it... it's by far the best tech purchase I've made in a long time. I use this device every day. The Jamboard app especially is great because I can join the same link from a laptop and present my drawing over HDMI. Jamboard pro tip: if you open the "board switcher" drawer and press the three dots, you can change the background to grid or dot paper. Game changer for sketching diagrams. Another great app for drawing is Procreate, which gives me layers, and has better drawing tools, like morphing my crooked lines into straight lines and perfect circles. Nice for sketching interfaces.

jtolds 6y ago
i spent a long time researching various writing devices, such as the reMarkable, the microsoft surface, the ipads, wacom, etc., and the ipad (in my case, the non-pro) at the time at least really had the best ratio of pixel latency to price. it really wasn't even a competition. writing on an android with slow pixel latency or something is really jarring, but yeah, the apple pencil setup is truly great.
- Scipio_Afri 6y ago
  What makes an ipad with the pen better than a microsoft surface book or surface pro? I'm looking at buying pro 7 or book 3 for taking notes in onenote and whiteboarding.. so these is definitely a relevant post to me.
  - jtolds 6y ago
    I haven't looked into it recently but yeah, like I said I was trying to find the sweet spot with pen latency and price. The iPad was cheap (~$350) and had great pen latency, whereas the reMarkable was not cheap or as full featured, and the Surface was also not as cheap and had reports of bad pen latency (e.g., see https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/e8kho9/if_there_is_no_way_to_improve_pen_latency_will/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/e8kho9/if_there_is... for an example) Update: It appears the situation has improved across the board. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-remarkable-2-is-an-ipad-pro-for-writers-and-other-professionals https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-remarkable-2-is-an-ipad-p... says 20-21ms is pretty standard now.