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I wrote "Hello World!" on witeboard.com using the active pen on my ThinkPad Yoga. It couldn't keep up with my writing and made a mess of it. Out of curiosity,

I wrote "Hello World!" on witeboard.com using the active pen on my ThinkPad Yoga. It couldn't keep up with my writing and made a mess of it. Out of curiosity, I tried ziteboard.com (which came up in a search for "online whiteboard"), and it rendered my handwriting perfectly. Here are the results from the two sites: https://imgur.com/a/nCKMEKE https://imgur.com/a/nCKMEKE I repeated the experiment on my Galaxy Note 8 with its active pen, with similar results on both sites (not included in the images above). Witeboard completely failed, while Ziteboard rendered my handwriting as expected. I also tried conventional touchscreen/TrackPoint/touchpad input on both devices to make sure it wasn't an issue with the active pen, but the results were again the same. As one last test, I connected a mouse to the ThinkPad and tried both sites. Witeboard worked a little better with this pointing device: it mostly kept up but did have a lot of straight lines and sharp angles when I tried to draw scribbly circular patterns. Ziteboard again performed perfectly. I have no affiliation or prior knowledge of either of these sites, I am just reporting my experience in a quick test of each.

brbsix 6y ago
I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. I had a similar experience. Witeboard seems to have trouble with curves. Trying to draw an "o" would invariably result in geometric shapes, a perfect circle, or some sort of rectangle. I was experiencing a lot of latency as well, which only aggravated the situation.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  There's a shape detection checkbox in the menu. That's probably the cause of geometric shapes.
  - Stratoscope 6y ago
    Thanks for the tip. I tried turning off that option and unfortunately it didn't improve things at all.
  - brbsix 6y ago
    That stopped it from conversion to perfect circles or elongated rectangles, but I still have issues drawing anything with smooth curves. E.g. Here's a side by side just drawing "o's" at varying speeds on witeboard and ziteboard.[0] To get anything remotely legible on witeboard, I have to be exceptionally slow. Even then, it's not a great result. [0]: https://imgur.com/a/QqJ3vpq https://imgur.com/a/QqJ3vpq
irskep 6y ago
While you're trying things out, would you mind testing https://browserboard.com https://browserboard.com? It's a little thing I made similar to these tools. It's not commercial, I just want to make sure it works well.
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  My pleasure! I love trying out stuff like this, especially in these days of trying to whiteboard remotely. As it is getting late, I may just make this a brief test right now. A minor point to note is that the URL with the www does not work - you may want to fix this: https://www.browserboard.com https://www.browserboard.com Also I love this bit of humbleness: > A pretty good online whiteboard So on to the handwriting test. Yes! You are much closer to the Ziteboard experience. Pen input works very well on both the ThinkPad Yoga and the Note 8 and it renders my writing nicely. You seem to be doing a similar kind of smoothing that Ziteboard does? When I write on Ziteboard I see a bit of angularity as I write, which gets smoothed out when I'm done. Yours seems to do this more in real time. One thing I got confused on: trying it on the Note 8, I wanted to scroll the view to get some blank space to write on. I found the four headed arrow icon which did exactly what I wanted - I can now scroll the view with the pen or finger. But now I can't figure out how to get out of this mode and write again? More later as I experiment with it...
  - irskep 6y ago
    The pan feature works like a "tool", so you can select any tool (pen, text, etc) to get back to drawing. Touch interactions are definitely a work in progress, I just want to make sure they aren't broken for now. :-) I'm doing fancy incremental line smoothing. It's not that hard, but no one else seems to do this, and it really bugs me. It takes some effort to understand how and make it performant, but it's such a nice boost to the feel of it, in my opinion.
    - Stratoscope 6y ago
      Yeah, that incremental line smoothing makes such a difference. Ziteboard is pretty good and I have no complaints about it - my writing seems a bit angular in realtime, but seeing that almost-immediate smoothing makes me think "Yeah, that's exactly what I meant to write." But you do it immediately as I go! I noticed a little bug on the Note 8 - when I'm on the main page where I can sign up or create a board, it's chopped off on the left and right sides. Selecting "Desktop site" from the Chrome menu fixes it.
duoboard 6y ago
you have a beautiful handwriting
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  Well thank you, you are very kind to say that. I do have to confess my superpower though: the subtle smoothing that ziteboard.com and our friend irskep's browserboard.com apply. Without that, the writing would not be nearly as pleasant to look at.
chrismorgan 6y ago
My first three tests of anything like this are: 1. Does it keep up with rapid movement? (If something fails this, it’s a total non-starter.) 2. Does the eraser on the back of my pen work? (If not, it’s very frustrating and a very bad sign.) 3. Does pressure sensitivity vary the thickness of lines? (I just find it’s a bad sign if something lacks this—tools that support pressure sensitivity seem to pretty consistently be far better than tools that don’t.) Witeboard fails all three, badly. So no way am I ever going to use it. Ziteboard is a bit better at #1 (though still not good), but fails #2 and #3 and has hideous latency and accuracy as well—it’s postprocessing strokes heavily, which makes sense for mouse but shouldn’t be done either at all or as much for a pen. So I’m not going to use Ziteboard either, it’s unpleasant to use. Browserboard is the worst of the three: hideous latency, terrible accuracy, missing the start and end of each stroke, and fails all three. I’m using Firefox on Windows on a Surface Book. I know much better is possible, because I wrote a simple, local, pressure-sensitive drawing tool some years back (in the early days of pointer events), and it worked just about as well as local apps like Microsoft Whiteboard or Krita or GIMP do. All three of these tools just seem to be making rookie errors like doing too much processing probably on the main thread, and skipping coalesced events. (Those are my guesses of the problems, as a developer that has dealt with this space.) None of them are good; Ziteboard is merely the least terrible.
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  Those are great insights. Have you found any online collaborative whiteboard tool that does what you want here? It is so frustrating compared to native apps where low latency, pressure sensitivity, and the pen eraser are table stakes.
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
    Sorry, I haven’t ever gone looking.
  - Hoasi 6y ago
    Mr.doob's multiuser sketchpad has the essentials as far as real-time sharing and drawing capacity. It would work very well in private mode: you could share a link to start recording a live session. https://multiuser-sketchpad.glitch.me https://multiuser-sketchpad.glitch.me https://mrdoob.com/#/125/multiuser_sketchpad https://mrdoob.com/#/125/multiuser_sketchpad
jayd16 6y ago
Seems like some kind of bug. It performs much better with trackpad input than touchscreen input.
lovasoa 6y ago
Could you also give feedback on https://wbo.ophir.dev https://wbo.ophir.dev ? Contrarily to the other mentioned before, it is opensource [1], and you can easily host your own instance if you don't like the idea of sharing your whiteboards on a random server on the internet. [1] https://github.com/lovasoa/whitebophir https://github.com/lovasoa/whitebophir
- hakre 6y ago
  Thanks for commenting, this one worked for me.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Not GP. Tested on my Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1 (AKA. my sidearm), with Dell's active pen, running Firefox. Works very well with the pen indeed. I love this, and the fact that it's self-hostable only makes it better. Also, props for deferring to the system color picker!
- librarydance 6y ago
  Awesomely responsive, great sharing model, very easy to use. Drawbacks I saw (for my own use patterns): - Not great for use with a pencil-based tablet: pencil vs. hand or other pointer are not distinguished. I don't want my finger to draw, I want only my pencil to draw. - Couldn't find how to permanently set a different size for pencil vs. eraser. I want a huge eraser (and a large eraser didn't work too well, independently of this comment) but a thin point pencil. - No "erase region" or "clear page" functionality. All of the above may look independent, but in fact are highly inter-related. If I wasn't constantly smudging the screen with my fingers being confused for pencils, I wouldn't need an eraser that much. If the large eraser worked well (and I didn't need to reset the size every time I switch from pencil to eraser) I wouldn't need the "clear board" functionality.
  - lovasoa 6y ago
    The clear page functionality has been asked before, but I'm not sure I want to implement it. It seems useful when you are alone on your board, but when there are dozens of participants, you don't want a single one to be able to clear everything in a single button press, be it by mistake or maliciously.
tomerbd 6y ago
How do you like your ThinkPad Yoga for note taking? I'm thinking if to get something like this or Samsung tablet for pdf reading and annotation writing notes on pdf for learning what do you think?
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  I don't actually use it that much for note taking, so can't advise on that specifically. I do use it for things like taking a screenshot and marking it up, and sketching out design ideas whiteboard-style. It works great for that, although most of the time I just use it as a conventional ThinkPad laptop. In fact when I use the pen it is usually with the display hinge in "laptop" mode, not flipped all the way around to tablet mode. Either way, as long as you have the software support you need, the hardware works great. It is both a touchscreen and a Wacom tablet with pressure sensitivity. At least the pressure sensing works in native Windows apps - web app support has been more spotty. For annotating PDF files, I guess you would need Acrobat Pro? Or would you use some other software?
  - tomerbd 6y ago
    Right now on my computer I use foxit reader it's superb I think for annotation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KJoxZABjOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KJoxZABjOY. So sounds like both Samsung and yoga are good for note taking and the only question is whether I want something light or something that could serve also as a laptop, thanks!
dgellow 6y ago
Same experience using a Surface + Surface Pen.
ComodoHacker 6y ago
>It couldn't keep up with my writing and made a mess of it. Could it be because of their feature called "shape detection"? It's on by default, you can turn it off in the menu.
chris_st 6y ago
For whatever it's worth, I tried both Witeboard and Ziteboard with my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, and they both worked great, tracking superbly.
ianhorn 6y ago
Oh wow, ziteboard has a feature I’ve been looking for for ages: vector graphics rather that pixel graphics. You can zoom in indefinitely, making nested notes and annotations possible!

brbsix 6y ago

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. I had a similar experience. Witeboard seems to have trouble with curves. Trying to draw an "o" would invariably result in geometric shapes, a perfect circle, or some sort of rectangle. I was experiencing a lot of latency as well, which only aggravated the situation.

frosted-flakes 6y ago
There's a shape detection checkbox in the menu. That's probably the cause of geometric shapes.
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  Thanks for the tip. I tried turning off that option and unfortunately it didn't improve things at all.
- brbsix 6y ago
  That stopped it from conversion to perfect circles or elongated rectangles, but I still have issues drawing anything with smooth curves. E.g. Here's a side by side just drawing "o's" at varying speeds on witeboard and ziteboard.[0] To get anything remotely legible on witeboard, I have to be exceptionally slow. Even then, it's not a great result. [0]: https://imgur.com/a/QqJ3vpq https://imgur.com/a/QqJ3vpq

irskep 6y ago

While you're trying things out, would you mind testing https://browserboard.com https://browserboard.com? It's a little thing I made similar to these tools. It's not commercial, I just want to make sure it works well.

Stratoscope 6y ago
My pleasure! I love trying out stuff like this, especially in these days of trying to whiteboard remotely. As it is getting late, I may just make this a brief test right now. A minor point to note is that the URL with the www does not work - you may want to fix this: https://www.browserboard.com https://www.browserboard.com Also I love this bit of humbleness: > A pretty good online whiteboard So on to the handwriting test. Yes! You are much closer to the Ziteboard experience. Pen input works very well on both the ThinkPad Yoga and the Note 8 and it renders my writing nicely. You seem to be doing a similar kind of smoothing that Ziteboard does? When I write on Ziteboard I see a bit of angularity as I write, which gets smoothed out when I'm done. Yours seems to do this more in real time. One thing I got confused on: trying it on the Note 8, I wanted to scroll the view to get some blank space to write on. I found the four headed arrow icon which did exactly what I wanted - I can now scroll the view with the pen or finger. But now I can't figure out how to get out of this mode and write again? More later as I experiment with it...
- irskep 6y ago
  The pan feature works like a "tool", so you can select any tool (pen, text, etc) to get back to drawing. Touch interactions are definitely a work in progress, I just want to make sure they aren't broken for now. :-) I'm doing fancy incremental line smoothing. It's not that hard, but no one else seems to do this, and it really bugs me. It takes some effort to understand how and make it performant, but it's such a nice boost to the feel of it, in my opinion.
  - Stratoscope 6y ago
    Yeah, that incremental line smoothing makes such a difference. Ziteboard is pretty good and I have no complaints about it - my writing seems a bit angular in realtime, but seeing that almost-immediate smoothing makes me think "Yeah, that's exactly what I meant to write." But you do it immediately as I go! I noticed a little bug on the Note 8 - when I'm on the main page where I can sign up or create a board, it's chopped off on the left and right sides. Selecting "Desktop site" from the Chrome menu fixes it.

duoboard 6y ago

you have a beautiful handwriting

Stratoscope 6y ago
Well thank you, you are very kind to say that. I do have to confess my superpower though: the subtle smoothing that ziteboard.com and our friend irskep's browserboard.com apply. Without that, the writing would not be nearly as pleasant to look at.

chrismorgan 6y ago

My first three tests of anything like this are: 1. Does it keep up with rapid movement? (If something fails this, it’s a total non-starter.) 2. Does the eraser on the back of my pen work? (If not, it’s very frustrating and a very bad sign.) 3. Does pressure sensitivity vary the thickness of lines? (I just find it’s a bad sign if something lacks this—tools that support pressure sensitivity seem to pretty consistently be far better than tools that don’t.) Witeboard fails all three, badly. So no way am I ever going to use it. Ziteboard is a bit better at #1 (though still not good), but fails #2 and #3 and has hideous latency and accuracy as well—it’s postprocessing strokes heavily, which makes sense for mouse but shouldn’t be done either at all or as much for a pen. So I’m not going to use Ziteboard either, it’s unpleasant to use. Browserboard is the worst of the three: hideous latency, terrible accuracy, missing the start and end of each stroke, and fails all three. I’m using Firefox on Windows on a Surface Book. I know much better is possible, because I wrote a simple, local, pressure-sensitive drawing tool some years back (in the early days of pointer events), and it worked just about as well as local apps like Microsoft Whiteboard or Krita or GIMP do. All three of these tools just seem to be making rookie errors like doing too much processing probably on the main thread, and skipping coalesced events. (Those are my guesses of the problems, as a developer that has dealt with this space.) None of them are good; Ziteboard is merely the least terrible.

Stratoscope 6y ago
Those are great insights. Have you found any online collaborative whiteboard tool that does what you want here? It is so frustrating compared to native apps where low latency, pressure sensitivity, and the pen eraser are table stakes.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  Sorry, I haven’t ever gone looking.
- Hoasi 6y ago
  Mr.doob's multiuser sketchpad has the essentials as far as real-time sharing and drawing capacity. It would work very well in private mode: you could share a link to start recording a live session. https://multiuser-sketchpad.glitch.me https://multiuser-sketchpad.glitch.me https://mrdoob.com/#/125/multiuser_sketchpad https://mrdoob.com/#/125/multiuser_sketchpad

jayd16 6y ago

Seems like some kind of bug. It performs much better with trackpad input than touchscreen input.

lovasoa 6y ago

Could you also give feedback on https://wbo.ophir.dev https://wbo.ophir.dev ? Contrarily to the other mentioned before, it is opensource [1], and you can easily host your own instance if you don't like the idea of sharing your whiteboards on a random server on the internet. [1] https://github.com/lovasoa/whitebophir https://github.com/lovasoa/whitebophir

hakre 6y ago
Thanks for commenting, this one worked for me.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Not GP. Tested on my Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1 (AKA. my sidearm), with Dell's active pen, running Firefox. Works very well with the pen indeed. I love this, and the fact that it's self-hostable only makes it better. Also, props for deferring to the system color picker!
librarydance 6y ago
Awesomely responsive, great sharing model, very easy to use. Drawbacks I saw (for my own use patterns): - Not great for use with a pencil-based tablet: pencil vs. hand or other pointer are not distinguished. I don't want my finger to draw, I want only my pencil to draw. - Couldn't find how to permanently set a different size for pencil vs. eraser. I want a huge eraser (and a large eraser didn't work too well, independently of this comment) but a thin point pencil. - No "erase region" or "clear page" functionality. All of the above may look independent, but in fact are highly inter-related. If I wasn't constantly smudging the screen with my fingers being confused for pencils, I wouldn't need an eraser that much. If the large eraser worked well (and I didn't need to reset the size every time I switch from pencil to eraser) I wouldn't need the "clear board" functionality.
- lovasoa 6y ago
  The clear page functionality has been asked before, but I'm not sure I want to implement it. It seems useful when you are alone on your board, but when there are dozens of participants, you don't want a single one to be able to clear everything in a single button press, be it by mistake or maliciously.

tomerbd 6y ago

How do you like your ThinkPad Yoga for note taking? I'm thinking if to get something like this or Samsung tablet for pdf reading and annotation writing notes on pdf for learning what do you think?

Stratoscope 6y ago
I don't actually use it that much for note taking, so can't advise on that specifically. I do use it for things like taking a screenshot and marking it up, and sketching out design ideas whiteboard-style. It works great for that, although most of the time I just use it as a conventional ThinkPad laptop. In fact when I use the pen it is usually with the display hinge in "laptop" mode, not flipped all the way around to tablet mode. Either way, as long as you have the software support you need, the hardware works great. It is both a touchscreen and a Wacom tablet with pressure sensitivity. At least the pressure sensing works in native Windows apps - web app support has been more spotty. For annotating PDF files, I guess you would need Acrobat Pro? Or would you use some other software?
- tomerbd 6y ago
  Right now on my computer I use foxit reader it's superb I think for annotation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KJoxZABjOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KJoxZABjOY. So sounds like both Samsung and yoga are good for note taking and the only question is whether I want something light or something that could serve also as a laptop, thanks!

dgellow 6y ago

Same experience using a Surface + Surface Pen.

ComodoHacker 6y ago

>It couldn't keep up with my writing and made a mess of it. Could it be because of their feature called "shape detection"? It's on by default, you can turn it off in the menu.

chris_st 6y ago

For whatever it's worth, I tried both Witeboard and Ziteboard with my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, and they both worked great, tracking superbly.

ianhorn 6y ago

Oh wow, ziteboard has a feature I’ve been looking for for ages: vector graphics rather that pixel graphics. You can zoom in indefinitely, making nested notes and annotations possible!