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.
That's just such a random feature to expect from a web app, leave alone to use as a "very bad sign". I can see how it can be useful, but I disagree that the lack of it is critical.
Sounds like I have some work to do. Not owning a pen-based device seems to be really hurting my ability to create a good experience here. I only own Windows, Mac, and iOS devices, and no tablet.
Thanks for trying it out, I really appreciate the notes.
> 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.
I promise Browserboard works really hard to get this right, though in JS it's not really possible to move things off the main thread. I wrote and maintain Literally Canvas, a fairly popular open source embedded drawing app, and dealt with some of these issues, but without owning hardware for testing it's really hard to cover the unknown unknowns.
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.
> Your browser is not compatible with this site. Please try accessing the site from your Chrome browser.
That’s a new type of hard fail. That’s the first time I’ve had Firefox be rejected.
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.
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.
If you already have an undo system then you could push the pre-cleared state to it as well.
it's easy to make armchair feature request suggestions when I haven't even so much just looked at the code, so I will end by saying good work on having a tool that people actually use!
Good show!
It's impossible to get something exactly like Apple Pencil/iPad Pro, in a shared Web-based tool, but this comes close.
Edit: it's quite a bit better in chrome, but still not perfect.
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!
To get anything remotely legible on witeboard, I have to be exceptionally slow. Even then, it's not a great result.
I tried turning off that option and unfortunately it didn't improve things at all.
A minor point to note is that the URL with the www does not work - you may want to fix this:
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...
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.
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.
Works surprisingly well, it's the first web whiteboard that's actually usable with the pen. Congratulations on getting this right! One minor inconvenience: when I draw with the pen, it doesn't show the line I'm drawing until I lift the pen back.
Its a little awkward that the line doesn't draw when your cursor / finger is held down, and only on release. Other than that, great. I had no dramas getting out of pan mode.
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?
Could it be because of their feature called "shape detection"? It's on by default, you can turn it off in the menu.
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.
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
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.