4 ms·

Photographing the whiteboard and emailing the photo(s) to everyone who was at the meeting is a great tool for remembering what was discussed and decided. I'm al

Photographing the whiteboard and emailing the photo(s) to everyone who was at the meeting is a great tool for remembering what was discussed and decided. I'm always surprised at how few people do it. If your whiteboard isn't big enough and you have to erase it halfway through, you do need the presence of mind to take a picture before rubbing it out. Leave the camera by the eraser.

wlievens 17y ago
There's software to clean up these pictures (remove glare, correct perspective). I've thought about software that goes further... I'm thinking for instance, vectorize the image, OCR the text, convert sloppily-drawn lines into actual arrows. Whiteboard-photo-to-Visio, so to speak. It won't be possible to do this fully automagically of course, because of bad clarity of writing and drawing, but a tool could be made that assists the user to do this rapidly. Not easy, but not undoable either. Would you think there's actually a business for software that does this? Or is it just a silly geek "solution looking for a problem"?
- pmjordan 17y ago
  To be perfectly honest, I can't see a use for it. You WANT to have it in handwriting because it reminds you who wrote what, which helps you remember what they said while writing it. Sure, you can't really show these things to outsiders, but I don't think automated tidying would help that much.
  - troels 17y ago
    OCR would be useful for allowing you to search.
- michael_dorfman 17y ago
  At my last startup, I used to be a heavy user of "Whiteboard Photo" software, and I'd definitely pay for software that does what you suggest (assuming the right price/features/value proposition.)
- terpua 17y ago
  Evernote doesn't go as far as you suggest but allows one to search for photographed words, which comes in handy.
- rahulvohra 17y ago
  There's scanr.com, which was pretty good a few years ago.
  - JonLundberg 17y ago
    For my mISV I wrote PhotoNote to clean up whiteboard images. I wrote it to scratch a personal itch, but I think it's useful and competitive in the market. http://www.southwedgesw.com/photonote http://www.southwedgesw.com/photonote

wlievens 17y ago

There's software to clean up these pictures (remove glare, correct perspective). I've thought about software that goes further... I'm thinking for instance, vectorize the image, OCR the text, convert sloppily-drawn lines into actual arrows. Whiteboard-photo-to-Visio, so to speak. It won't be possible to do this fully automagically of course, because of bad clarity of writing and drawing, but a tool could be made that assists the user to do this rapidly. Not easy, but not undoable either. Would you think there's actually a business for software that does this? Or is it just a silly geek "solution looking for a problem"?

pmjordan 17y ago
To be perfectly honest, I can't see a use for it. You WANT to have it in handwriting because it reminds you who wrote what, which helps you remember what they said while writing it. Sure, you can't really show these things to outsiders, but I don't think automated tidying would help that much.
- troels 17y ago
  OCR would be useful for allowing you to search.
michael_dorfman 17y ago
At my last startup, I used to be a heavy user of "Whiteboard Photo" software, and I'd definitely pay for software that does what you suggest (assuming the right price/features/value proposition.)
terpua 17y ago
Evernote doesn't go as far as you suggest but allows one to search for photographed words, which comes in handy.
rahulvohra 17y ago
There's scanr.com, which was pretty good a few years ago.
- JonLundberg 17y ago
  For my mISV I wrote PhotoNote to clean up whiteboard images. I wrote it to scratch a personal itch, but I think it's useful and competitive in the market. http://www.southwedgesw.com/photonote http://www.southwedgesw.com/photonote