7 ms·
Show HN: a free multi-user whiteboard with unlimited, zoomable surface
- TobiHeidi 15y agosum up your pitch to make it easier for users to get what you are pitching. "collaborative zoomable user interface to create sketches" is the same as "multiuser whiteboard" just easier to get.
- TobiHeidi 15y agoOh and btw: Dont repost the same thing three times.
- jeffool 15y agoAs I believe the zoom makes it more unique, "multi-user whiteboard offering unlimited zooming", or the likes. But you're absolutely right.
- florianguenther 15y agothanks for the hint. I changed the title, better?
- sylvain_ 15y agoGreat tool ! Simple and focused. Maybe two things a little more helpful : 1. The ability to press Ctrl+Z to undo 2. A global reset button (not so important as we can refresh the page) I would love to try this on an iPad with a pen.
- yarone 15y agoLooks great on iPad, well done.
- Nickste 15y agoDoh - it seems to crash safari when I go to it on my iPad? iOS 4.3.5
- jackvalentine 15y agoWorking fine on 4.3.5 here, just emailed a link to several friends to see what happens over the next couple of hours with it. The best bit about it is the super-low barrier to entry/sharing.
- cefarix 15y agohttp://sketchub.com/jte1y8agb4 http://sketchub.com/jte1y8agb4
- olalonde 15y agohttp://sketchub.com/ndhep5on0v http://sketchub.com/ndhep5on0v
- kgthegreat 15y agohttp://sketchub.com/pln5jl8d6d http://sketchub.com/pln5jl8d6d
- jackvalentine 15y agoInstead of having tonnes of empty test pages, why don't we all just agree to use the parent of my comment as the test canvas for this thread? Edit: I somehow cannot draw in the one I suggested. Sorry.
- samarudge 15y agoI'm not sure if it's just me, but there seem to have been a few very similar sites/ideas posted here over the last few days. Well done for making it work in IE though =)
- MortenK 15y agoNot working in IE 8 for me at least :) Works fine in Firefox. Great app, would be very interesting to try it on one of them digital whiteboards.
- florianguenther 15y agoOn a multitouch table it works great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpDp2Izx4W8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpDp2Izx4W8
- davidedicillo 15y agoFlorian, what's the device you are using?
- florianguenther 15y agosorry, but I don't know the hardware details. It was a laptop with external display, multitouch was plugged in via USB and handled by a software called dreaMTouch.
- nicpottier 15y agoTo me the zoomable, unlimited surface part is what makes it super neat. I might actually use it if I had some way of typing text on there.. I suppose for a tablet it is awesome though.
- gren 15y agoIf you zoom in too much, it's very lagging. Strange, It should be when zooming out (FF 5.0)
- melling 15y agoI think you're running an old version of Firefox. :-)
- pseudonym 15y agoZooming out too far on chrome makes the input not show up properly, and occasionally crashes the browser window. Additionally, after zooming out for a bit, I wasn't able to get back down to the layers I was drawing at before.
- d0m 15y agoI would definitely use it. Add a [T] icon for texts as writing with the mouse is meh!
- ljf 15y ago+1 - esp if you could 'box' the text then be able to use it. This would be great for running a remove agile board. Nice idea - great execution.
- florianguenther 15y agoAdded a [T] icon!
- urza 15y agoInfinite zooming is nice. How is it implemented? I would like it as a library.
- florianguenther 15y agoThe library is already out there, I open sourced it: https://github.com/florianguenther/zui53 https://github.com/florianguenther/zui53 (but it's very early beta, bad documented)
- p4bl0 15y agoThis is awesome, I'd just like to have a tool to write with my keyboard.
- maximebf 15y agoYou can draw great fractals with it! Awesome job
- ed209 15y agothis is pretty neat, from a designers point of view here are some things I'd suggest: - something like a photoshop navigator where you see your zoom level vs your current canvas. Currently it's quite easy to zoom out a lose your stuff. - alternatively have a zoom % and return to 100% and center - As well as the current freehand drawing style, have a version that straightens the lines for you. - keep line thickness at any zoom level so it's not so bad when you zoom back in (although I can think of nice uses as it is) - write text
- hjalle 15y agoTotally agree, I'd like to be able to draw a straight line as well. I don't have that talent manually =) Some command such as shift would be nice for this, as well as the ctrl + z command
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- felixchan 15y agoAwesome, but with more keyboard shortcuts I'd use it all the time. (CTRL to pan, different keys to select different things)
- florianguenther 15y agoUse the space bar to pan like in PhotoShop, other shortcuts coming soon!
- GeneTraylor 15y agoI work in a distributed office, and over the past few days I've been trying to find a "concept mapper", which helps us to make projects more concrete through flowcharts etc. The problem that I keep on facing is that the web apps which dominate the current market just don't cut my needs. They don't allow for proper exploration, and collaboration is a frustrating progress. We would gladly pay for a tool that doesn't get in our way and just lets us all communicate. I think that you will find a ready market, if you can solve the thorny problem of communicating projects, which involve several interconnected parts/ideas. I know for a fact that I'll buy it.
- florianguenther 15y agogreat to hear! :-)
- Major_Grooves 15y agohave you looked at Creately? I've been using it for a month or so and it seems pretty good: http://creately.com/ http://creately.com/
- senko 15y agoCool stuff! I've looked a bit at what it uses: shapes drawn are vectors, the app uses Raphael (http://raphaeljs.com/ http://raphaeljs.com/) for drawing, and Pusher (http://pusher.com/ http://pusher.com/) for whiteboard syncing.
- superted 15y agoRegarding the Pusher web site, am I the only one who cannot resist the temptation of loading up Firebug to verify whether the counter is for real or "interpolated"?
- julius 15y agoActually, just reloading the page reveals the counters nasty secrets :) It currently starts approximately at 14,230,617,000
- dctanner 15y agoUnfortunately it's not really viable to sent a counter msg for every msg which goes through the system ;) Our stats and logging has to be somewhat delayed.
- A1kmm 15y agoThe front ends seem to get desynchronised when two incompatible concurrent edits happen; this is a difficult issue to resolve, but one solution would be to change the data flow so local edits are drawn by the client on a transparent canvas, get sent to the server, and then get drawn on the underlying main canvas only when they are sent back from the server. The transparent canvas can be reset by the client at that point (you might need some synchronisation mechanism for this), so all users will end up having consistent state once edits have been processed by the server.
- user24 15y agoThis is what we do for http://300lin.es http://300lin.es ;) edit: My God, it's full of cocks.
- cipherpunk 15y ago:D
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- BoppreH 15y agoQuit hint: it's too easy to make a DOS by quickly drawing hundreds of lines in the same spot. It doesn't take more than two minutes and regular writing or drawing is too slow and ends up erased before finished. Maybe limit the number of lines an user can draw during a certain time?
- user24 15y agoThanks :) Yeah, we limit the length of line to try to avoid scribblers. We thought of rate-limiting the number of lines too, and adjusting the limit, so the first time you hit the limit you're stopped for 1 seconds, next time for 2 seconds, then 4, 8, 16 and so on. Would probably work quite well. PS is your hostname 'bd222edited for privacy.com.br' ?
- cidermonk3y 15y agoI would have liked the ability to change the line thickness, to work around you'd have to zoom out or in depending if you wanted a line thicker or thinner with the latter being particularly difficult as it's harder to keep track of where you are in relation to the rest of the page.
- jim_h 15y agoVery cool. There are some minor issues though. Here is my sketch: http://sketchub.com/view/d4b8fcb36fe4b078b100069bafebd352 http://sketchub.com/view/d4b8fcb36fe4b078b100069bafebd352 I'm using a Thinkpad with Wacom enabled display and stylus. It 'should' say 'hello world' 3 times and have an underline after each one. In the saved and view only link, it shows a 4th 'hello world' on the left and more slanted. It was erased before my real test. It seems to miss certain strokes as you can tell by the sketch. Mainly straight lines. This might have been caught as trying to move the sketch area, but it did not move or register the line. (As a control test to check display and stylus, I wrote the same text in OneNote and it was handled fine.)
- icode 15y agoNot working here on my HTC Desire with Android 2.2. Looks like there is no way to draw.
- jamesgeck0 15y agoSimilar issue on Desktop Opera 11.50.
- jisaacstone 15y agoI'm on Opera 11.5 / OSX 10.6.7 - can view but not draw.
- jisaacstone 15y agoAlso: firefox freezes when I try to open a 2nd tab with a different whiteboard.
- swah 15y agoLooks a lot like Khanacademy's Scratchpad they recently open sourced.
- bane 15y agoCool. I'd love to be able to upload an image, or series of images, to draw over.
- waffenklang 15y agofind the hidden word: http://sketchub.com/xuugfkbshr http://sketchub.com/xuugfkbshr
- ck2 15y agoVery nice - you should do what I figured out for a project - momentum when there is a big action, and fine control for small actions - if I scroll the wheel dramatically, give me some momentum on that zoom - if I scroll it slowly, no momentum and fine increments (like you have now) The way I did this in javascript was to create an array of zoom in/out and the four directions - then you add or subtract from the array based on intensity of gestures over time - even keyboard action keys (+/-) can have momentum this way by adding when there is continuous keypresses - I was pleased how it turned out in the end.
- tlear 15y agoVery cool, unlimited zoom is an awesome idea
- czzarr 15y agogenius
- jeremydavid 15y agoYes, you need text and images. The company I work for has been looking for a simple, fast, and good solution to make notes over webpage wireframes. I think this could be it!
- swombat 15y agoTry our Woobius Eye tool, too, it's pretty neat for collaborative visual work. See: http://woobiuseye.com http://woobiuseye.com And a video of how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhox59Ia5yc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhox59Ia5yc
- jeremydavid 15y agoThanks for that link. It looks promising, but the canvas is just too small.
- jeremydavid 15y agoBeing able to type in a URL and then you draw over that would be fantastic too.
- davidedicillo 15y ago
- username3 15y agoIf this is like switching between layers using your scroll-wheel, let us push part of the sketch back or forward, scale down or up.