I love that this exist, but the core problem with remote whiteboards is that everyone can write something legible when using a marker on a whiteboard, but it's way harder with a mouse/trackpad.
It would be nice to have some features that made it easier - the features I really miss from apps I use to create diagrams are basic shapes like rectangles and the ability to select and move/resize/copy existing drawing.
Thank you!
What I am missing is not a whiteboard.
Whiteboard is just a solution that works in the office.
The underlying requirement is: I want to be able to express myself in a visual way together with others.
So a solution to the same requirement, that works remote, shouldn't have to mimick a whiteboard.
Instead I would like the ability to :
* Draw straight rectangles, lines and arrows
* Type text with my keyboard
* Move stuff afterwards
* Let participants point at different places simultaneously
I'm looking forward to trying out Escalidraw.
It seems to cover the first points, but not the last one.
So I find miro.com does exactly all of this very well. It just happens to try to do a whole bunch of other stuff alongside it, which makes the initial investment in moving your team to using it quite substantial.
You can get a decent little drawing tablet for $30 these days. You'd probably spend half of that in the cost of pens over the device's lifetime. They're no longer ultra-expensive specialized equipment.
> You can get a decent little drawing tablet for $30 these days. You'd probably spend half of that in the cost of pens over the device's lifetime. They're no longer ultra-expensive specialized equipment.
Most people probably already have an ipad or android tablet. Drawing with your fingers is already far better than a mouse and a basic active pen like the logitech crayon is within anyone’s range who has an ipad. There are many clipboard sharing options to quickly push a cloud whiteboard from the laptop to the tablet.
I don’t get why anyone would subject themselves to the pain of drawing with a mouse.
I do. I have an iPad and the Apple Pencil has made a huge difference for me, but I think its hard to expect everyone to have a device (even a cheap one) for that occasion when they want to contribute to the whiteboard.
That's really interesting -- it genuinely does make drawing with my mouse far easier!
I was trying to write with my mouse on the various whiteboards mentioned above and getting a garbled mess, but it's distinctly legible using your approach. :)
> I love that this exist, but the core problem with remote whiteboards is that everyone can write something legible when using a marker on a whiteboard, but it's way harder with a mouse/trackpad.
I'm actually experimenting with that with my side project Doodledocs [1], that feature isn't live yet, though. Also, for the user, one thing I found is that if you hold a large paperclip in your hand like it's a pencil, you can make easier writing motions on a trackpad. I do this when I'm using my Macbook instead of my iPad.
[1] https://doodledocs.com is basically Witeboard but with a less pretty and more buggy interface :P (I wrote it last year as a side project)
It would be nice to have some features that made it easier - the features I really miss from apps I use to create diagrams are basic shapes like rectangles and the ability to select and move/resize/copy existing drawing.
Witeboard is great name BTW.