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Show HN: OurBoard – free and open source online whiteboard
- nullzzz 5y agoThis is my open-source project. I use it almost daily for simple whiteboarding, notetaking, online whiteboard sessions. The idea is to have a simple and highly usable, fast alternative to more complex software such as Miro or Mural.
- asicsp 5y agoSee if you can edit the title of this submission to add `Show HN: ` prefix? See https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html for details. Also, perhaps edit your comment with link to the source code.
- nullzzz 5y agoDone! Src at https://github.com/raimohanska/ourboard https://github.com/raimohanska/ourboard
- easygenes 5y agoCan you comment quickly on what state it's in? What features does it support? What does it offer that you wouldn't get with Miro or Mural? What are some features you might miss from those? Are you still actively developing it? What should we expect from it in the next year? Are you looking for collaborators? For instance, something I quickly noticed is that there is no freehand drawing, arrows, or connection-building tools currently. Are those coming?
- nullzzz 5y agoQuick overview: - notes, areas for organizing, a few shapes and colors, connectors - images and videos dragn drop / copypaste - more on github readme - not very active development lately. Just today I improved on the front page features - You get a simple and easy board, where other tools may seem bloated and complex
- mkl 5y agoThere are connection arrows. Click the icon that looks like a share button.
- nullzzz 5y agoNo roadmap / plans. Contributions welcome. You can also self-host this one very easily btw.
- freedomben 5y agothis no doubt appeals to a certain niche (of which I'm a part of), but this (along with open source) is a massive benefit. Thanks so much!
- cutemonster 5y agoHow do you use online whiteboards in you organization? (I've never tried)
- mkl 5y agoI think I'm missing something. How do you use it for whiteboarding? Where is the pen tool? Also, is the change log in a working state? I can't seem to make it show anything. Is it possible to close it after you've opened it?
- nullzzz 5y agoNo pen tool sorry! Change log is not fully functional. Whiteboarding maybe a bit misleading here. Let’s call it a sticky note wall, with images and connectors?
- kimchidude 5y agoSo it’s a flowchart wall? As the earlier user shared, I can’t seem to get the wall to do anything either. Sticky notes can’t be dragged and the text on the site gets cut off at the site’s edges. I’m on iphone.
- nullzzz 5y agoYeah it’s mobile-dead, works on desktop.
- arendtio 5y agoCongrats for reaching this state. I really like the clean and simple interface. What I am missing are a few more sentences about hosting. I saw the documentation about the variables and the commands to host a dev environment, but which commands should I use to run it in production?
- nullzzz 5y agoThanks! May I ask you to open a Github issue on this, and I’m sure we can get u up an running. HN isn’t a great support forum :)
- tikwidd 5y agoThis is great, congrats for shipping. It also reminds me a bit of Padlet in that there is no freehand drawing and the focus is more around connections between objects. Maybe it would be better to describe it as a corkboard or pinboard. I do have some layout issues in Chrome, y is overflowing so I get two y-scrollbars.
- trenchgun 5y agoI agree that there is a need for this. I don't want to remain locked to their closed systems. Godspeed!
- nullzzz 5y agoIt’s not mobile friendly at all though
- juicysaurus 5y agoI've contributed some lines of code to this project, and thought it might be interesting to some that the library powering the UI is also written by the OP. It's a clever experiment that uses JSX but instead of VDOM diffing it embeds observables directly into the DOM. Harmaja (https://github.com/raimohanska/harmaja https://github.com/raimohanska/harmaja)
- tyingq 5y agoThe hover text for "note" and "area" both say "drag to add a new text note". Then the one for "text" says "drag to add a new text area". I'm not sure if that's on purpose, but it's confusing. Though all three function in a way that's consistent with their respective icon. Also, on the "area" widget, there's a popup when I click on it, with a background color picker and font size choice. But there's also an icon with 4 squares arranged 2x2. It's not clear what that does.
- nullzzz 5y agoThanks for the input, that’s highly appreciated! Let’s see about this soonish. You can also use Github issues at https://github.com/raimohanska/ourboard/issues https://github.com/raimohanska/ourboard/issues
- woudsma 5y agoHeroku error :) That was fast. Edit: never mind, back up!
- nullzzz 5y agoOof. Would check logs if not at the gym atm IRLOL
- nullzzz 5y agoHeroku killed the app but it was fortunately span back up quickly. Apparently 512MB memory on a single Heroku dyno is not Hacker News scale. The application does have a horizontally scalable architecture for sharding boards on multiple hosts, it's not just fully deployed as there has mostly been just 1-2 boards in use at any given time.
- jhgb 5y agoI'm mildly surprised that the view rectangle in the "mini-map" in the bottom right is not draggable with the usual semantics of panning the view. Or at least if it's supposed to work that way, it doesn't in my browser.
- nullzzz 5y agoYep, that’s missing and would make sense. It’s an open source hobby project so it’s bound to have some rough corners :)
- jncraton 5y agoThis looks great. Thanks for sharing! If folks are interested in this sort of thing, I also maintain an extremely minimalist open source whiteboarding tool: https://github.com/jncraton/box-line-text https://github.com/jncraton/box-line-text
- nullzzz 5y agoLooks cool! Like the super plain appearance and simplicity. Would suit to screencasts and quick diagrams, while OurBoard is more of a collaboration tool, I’d say.
- jncraton 5y agoThanks! The goal is simplicity, so it doesn't attempt feature parity with a more comprehensive tool like yours. Collaboration features, along with any features that can't be implemented on simple static hosting, are out of scope. I really like the collaborative nature of what you've built. I can definitely imagine using this in meetings or group planning sessions.
- codazoda 5y agoTotally breaks the back button for me
- nullzzz 5y agoSorry for that! Could you elaborate on the scenario and your setup so we can see what can be done?
- eddieroger 5y agoHappened to me, too (Safari 14.1.1, macOS 11.4). Once I went to a board, I could back to the board selection screen, but no further, including back to HN. It just doesn't go - no errors in the console, but never goes back further. Are you doing something with the browser's history?
- nullzzz 5y agoOkay this is good info, thanks! Created an Issue here: https://github.com/raimohanska/ourboard/issues/160 https://github.com/raimohanska/ourboard/issues/160 It's a single-page app so to support in-app navigation (back button etc) it needs to interact with the browser's History API.
- butwhywhyoh 5y agoTitle says whiteboard. Can't draw on it. Hmmm. This is more like a free-form Trello board.
- nullzzz 5y agoThat's a good point. It's definitely not a drawing tool. More of an electronic version of post-it notes and images on a whiteboard. You can "draw" diagrams using shapes and arrows and text, but not freeform. I personally haven't missed freeform drawing.
- remram 5y agoAnd it's grey. This is in no way a whiteboard, it's a grey wall for post-its.
- thecodrr 5y agoThere's a bug that hijacks your back button. At least on mobile.
- indianhippie 5y agoI have tried quite a few online whiteboards during the pandemic WFH. IMHO nothing comes close to https://excalidraw.com https://excalidraw.com No signup needed, clean interface, fast load times and an option to self host makes it an excellent product.
- reacharavindh 5y agoExcalidraw is pleasant indeed! Thanks for the introduction :-)
- brightball 5y agoThat looks really sharp! I’ve been very pleased with Miro for corporate use though.
- sokoloff 5y agoMiro has an interesting learning curve (at least for me). I absolutely hated it for the first couple dozen times I used it. Then, there was one meeting where it was particularly effective in running a “sticky note” exercise and my opinion on it flipped that day from around -7 to +3 [on a -10 to +10 scale]. It’s grown slightly on me since then as well; I might be a +5 on it right now.
- brightball 5y agoWe used it to run remote PI Planning and it was very effective for that.
- arendtio 5y agoI like Excalidraw too, but in my opinion OurBoard has a different focus. - Excalidraw is superb if you want to draw something freestyle. - Ourboard seems to focus more on creating boxes (notes) which you can group and connect. If I understand it correctly, you can even load Github issues into your board. At the start of the pandemic, I searched for Whiteboards where I could draw things freestyle (installed MS Whiteboard), but over time I noticed, that I used MS Powerpoint most of the time, because it was so much better at handling boxes in collaborative environments. I think OurBoard could be even better at this job.
- nullzzz 5y agoHere's an Ourboard board that demonstrates the key features of the service. https://www.ourboard.io/b/0b5a9bd8-93ae-446c-afbd-80ebfcb1e0ee https://www.ourboard.io/b/0b5a9bd8-93ae-446c-afbd-80ebfcb1e0... It's read-only, but you can select all (Cmd-A), create a new board and paste the contents on a new board of yours on the Ourboard front page. I now realize that a Fork Board feature might be useful. Also having second thoughts on whether it's a good idea to have a "default board" that's read-write for anonymous users. Some political content observed on that one today.
- Operyl 5y agoGiven the racist stuff being thrown around on it now, it’s probably better that you just make it generate a random new board with example data.
- nullzzz 5y agoYes. The shared global board definitely has to go. Should have known not to trust people to behave…
- throwawaysea 5y agoAt some point I have to wonder if it is actual racists or HN users poking holes into moderation, security, etc. This seems a bit too niche to be the target of random actual racists.
- Operyl 5y agoRacism is .. well, everywhere. The technical community isn't immune to it.
- hahamrfunnyguy 5y agoI didn't see a draw function or way to upload an image. For me, these are pretty critical in a whiteboard tool.
- nullzzz 5y agoImages can be drag/dropped or copy pasted onto the board. Freeform drawing is not supported.
- ianberdin 5y agoLooks cool, unfortunately Figma already did the perfect solution called FigJam and it’s absolutely awesome and free.
- nullzzz 5y agoWhy would that be unfortunate, it sounds awesome! Gotta give it a try.
- trenchgun 5y agoLooks extremely promising!!!