
Show HN: A virtual whiteboard for working or teaching remotely - MarkMc
http://whiteboardfox.com/
======
MarkMc
This is little 'scratch-your-own-itch' project I started working on about 9
months ago. Front end is GWT, back end is Java servlets. Database was
originally MySQL but switched to Prevayler for performance reasons.

My YouTube video gives a nice overview of the benefits of a virtual
whiteboard: [http://youtu.be/MDEHFHG1l3Y](http://youtu.be/MDEHFHG1l3Y)

What does Hacker News think?

~~~
leetreveil
The video shows Mark explaining to Sally how a Facebook login would work on
her website with the whiteboard.

A killer missing feature seems to be microphone support, which the video
alludes to.

~~~
ul5255
Looking at all the feature requests here I can't help but think that you guys
are reinventing TeamSpeak. The only difference I see is that with TeamSpeak
you first must install a client whereas this runs in a browser.

~~~
cpncrunch
Actually, there are lots of other online whiteboards that have all of these
features without requiring a download or plugin.

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wodow
I love it - works perfectly... but immediately the feature creeper in me has
kicked in. Killer features

1\. Be able to type in text (any font will do)

2\. Drag-and-drop an image to be be able to annotate it over the top (would be
excellent design task, e.g. using screenshots of some work-in-progress).

3\. Movable objects?

~~~
divyahansg
A similar site I built ([http://stoodle.org](http://stoodle.org)) supports
these three features in addition to group voice conferencing through Twilio.

~~~
oscilatorium
I just tried stoodle, but I'm not seeing the data being replicated across
windows. e.g I have some doodles here in
[http://stoodle.ck12.org/class/53f619cc417e3](http://stoodle.ck12.org/class/53f619cc417e3)
but when i open this link in another chrome tab (or a different browser ffox),
I am not seeing anything

------
tartuffe78
[http://whiteboardfox.com/972-7551-8980](http://whiteboardfox.com/972-7551-8980)

~~~
vishnugupta
Crowd sourced art is in progress :-). Everyone please join!

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krmmalik
Oh my god. I love this! I've been waiting for a simple polished solution for
this for years and years. When skype came along and then we got skype
extensions, I thought they'd solve this, but oh no. Every solution that has
come out so far has been mediocre at best. I'm glad someone decided to tackle
this properly. I haven't had chance to try on iPad, but from the homepage it
seems it'll work fine there as well?

~~~
MarkMc
Haha thank you! Yes it works fine on an iPad - in fact better than an laptop
because using a finger to draw is so much more fluid and intuitive than a
mouse or touchpad. Here's a video of me using WhiteboardFox.com to draw with
my iPad:
[http://youtu.be/MDEHFHG1l3Y?t=1m10s](http://youtu.be/MDEHFHG1l3Y?t=1m10s)

And yes I had the same thoughts last year when I was looking to work with a
remote programmer: "Surely, surely someone has a half-decent solution?!". At
the time, no. Now, yes :)

~~~
arethuza
"Yes it works fine on an iPad"

Understatement - it works _really_ well on an iPad (even my ancient iPad 1).

------
senko
Very nice. Seems to be vector-based (ie. how the eraser and undo/redo work,
and allowing things like pan&zoom).

I'm the author of a similar tool, [https://awwapp.com/](https://awwapp.com/) ,
which is bitmap-based, ie the eraser works as it'd on a physical whiteboard,
and there's no zoom (or undo/redo).

Great start, looking forward to seeing the future progress!

~~~
zura
Care to share income numbers (assuming it is ads based)? thanks

~~~
senko
It's not, but we've recently rolled out the ability to add the wihteboard to
your own site, which is a paid subscription-based service.

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Nemi
This is freaking awesome. You probably know this but it does not work in IE on
windows 8 with a touchscreen. Chrome works fine however. I am guessing it is
something to do with the touch events that IE has that are different?

~~~
MarkMc
I didn't know that! Afraid I don't have a Windows 8 touchscreen device, so
haven't tested on that platform. Will look into it....

------
kenny_r
The brain-shaped thought bubble filled with blue gears is _very_ reminiscent
of the devopsdays[1] logo...

[1]: [http://devopsdays.org/](http://devopsdays.org/)

------
valar_m
SSL, private boards, and some kind of assurance that what we're drawing truly
is being erased.

Add that, and we'll pay you money to let us use it. I suspect other companies
will, too.

------
8ig8
This is handy for remote tutoring. I dropped a math worksheet image onto the
whiteboard. Imagine working remotely with a student. Here's a static
'snapshot'.

[http://s1.whiteboardfox.com/s/54cb7dbaf913f471.png](http://s1.whiteboardfox.com/s/54cb7dbaf913f471.png)

Tried this years ago over dialup with some MS app. The technology was flakey
and kept getting in the way. This works great.

------
oneweirdtrick
You hear that? That's the sound of Google's Business Strategy team cueing
Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries'.

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jleask
That's something I've had on my todo list for ages. As others have said
though, it'd be great to be able type text as drawing letters with a mouse
always takes ages and looks rubbish.

SVG export would be nice too, perhaps a paid for extra :)

~~~
visarga
Also, needs video/audio chat integration, in case you want to do more than
watch the board getting filled up.

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afaqurk
Very nice!

My friend's parent is disabled and we thought about doing something like this
and hooking it up to a touch-screen monitor for them.

That way the parent can see messages from her kids (in a different city) and
vice versa without any effort or typing.

------
billybofh
Do you have any plans to have a 'broadcast' mode where the person who creates
the whiteboard is the only one who can draw on it? I can see itchy student
fingers abusing it otherwise in a teaching context... ;-)

------
jasonkester
Nice first cut. It's actually surprising that it took a full seven years for
anybody else to show up Twiddla's [1] space with a true HTML5 whiteboard. Back
when we started out, there were half a dozen commercial versions of this exact
thing, but all in Flash or Java, and all trying to compete with WebEx.

It think you're on the right path positioning this for use in schools. That's
our main use case too, replacing overhead projectors in the classroom, and
ruining snow days for an entire generation of kids.

Good luck!

[1] [http://www.twiddla.com/](http://www.twiddla.com/)

~~~
cpncrunch
It was more like two years actually :)

Anyway, back in 2007 java and flash were reasonable solutions. Today, not so
much.

PS, how do you make any money from twiddla if you give away free educational
accounts?

~~~
jasonkester
We make the lion's share of our profits from API customers.

------
graeme
I use this kind of thing professionally, for distance tutoring. Looks very
nice, draws smoothly. I like the easy "erase" function.

There's one thing stopping me from using it: the URL

I use jotwithme right now, and I can set a session name, then tell people to
go there. Here, I have to get the url from my ipad, sent it to myself somehow,
and send it to the student.

That's not exactly hard, but it's annoying enough compared to jotwithme that
I'd keep using that. But if you had that feature, I'd switch. Jot's erase
feature isn't as good.

------
gtramont
Back in 2011, when I was starting with node.js I built something I called
'Writeboard'
[https://github.com/gtramontina/Writeboard](https://github.com/gtramontina/Writeboard)
. It's not an active project anymore, but I've considered resuming working on
it. A rewrite of it is hosted in heroku, at
[http://writeboard2.herokuapp.com/](http://writeboard2.herokuapp.com/) \--
Check it out.

~~~
gtramont
Totally experimental, by the way...

------
gldnspud
This tool was pretty responsive to draw with using a tablet, and I'm glad the
pen width isn't very large.

I love using a Wacom tablet for drawing diagrams, and wish there was a good
shared whiteboard tool that supported pen pressure.

I didn't know if this is possible at first, but a quick search revealed
[http://muro.deviantart.com/](http://muro.deviantart.com/), which supports pen
pressure using a plugin.

Any chance you might add that kind of flair to whiteboardfox?

~~~
MarkMc
Maybe in the long term, but for now I'm concentrating on other things (like
adding typeable text)

------
chrisweekly
Surprised to learn this is Java and long-polling. (These features scream
Meteor / DDP to me.) Regardless, it's a v good start. Thanks for sharing!

~~~
MarkMc
Yes the Java async messaging stuff required some pretty deep understanding,
especially ironing out a couple of deadlock bugs (ironically drawing a diagram
in whiteboard fox helped me understand the deadlocks:
[https://s1.whiteboardfox.com/s/420876221780898a.png](https://s1.whiteboardfox.com/s/420876221780898a.png))

I would have much preferred a solid framework or library. Maybe I didn't spend
enough time researching the alternatives to writing it myself.

But then again I wonder if a library would have had the low-level flexibility
I needed. For example, I found that one of the most frustrating things when
using whiteboard fox was that your internet connection would go down and you
wouldn't know about it. So you would not realise that there was a problem and
think that the other person had simply stopped drawing. My solution was to add
a 5-second heartbeat so that the browser could display a 'disconnected'
message when it didn't get the heartbeat. Would a high-level library allow me
the option of such a heartbeat?

------
yaddayadda
@MarkMC - Any idea if your browser whiteboard will with the TouchPico
([https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/touchpico-turn-any-
surfac...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/touchpico-turn-any-surface-into-
a-touch-screen/x/1083434)) which is an inexpensive touchscreen projector. (I'm
just thinking these would be a great combination of technologies.)

------
unwind
I tried opening "my" whiteboard in a second tab in Firefox (on Windows). The
second tab's view is distorted, it reminds me of having a badly programmed
modulo register on the Amiga.

Which doesn't say much to most, I guess... It looks as if the scan lines are
mis-aligned, i.e. as if some pixels in each line is missing from each, causing
the resulting image to be slanted and distorted.

~~~
MarkMc
Hmmm - send me a screenshot. I'll take a look.

~~~
unwind
"You have mail". Good luck. :)

------
soneca
Great work! My feature request: similar to the "insert pic", create an insert
slide. You upload a .PPT and select which slide you want to use.

If teachersare going to use this, many of them will already have a powerpoint
to use.

Adding to this, an easy way to navegate betweens different whiteboards of the
same author (so it is easy to go to the next slide).

Just my opinion about what might work.

~~~
louhike
The problem is that it will then become an interactive powerpoint, not a
whiteboard anymore. It sounds more like a new product to me, not just a simple
new feature.

~~~
cpncrunch
Actually, it is a very commonly used feature...many teachers using online
whiteboards for tutoring will upload a preprepared word doc/ppt worksheet and
then the student will write in the answers.

------
hugozap
I would love to use this, but i don't have a facebook account. I hope you
support other login options

~~~
MarkMc
You don't need to log in at all - just bookmark the whiteboard pages you want
to keep!

------
devniel
My respect for use the java stack, I like it. Here another guy to tried to
build his own whiteboard a few years ago
[http://notephy.com](http://notephy.com) , I'm just searching a solid support
to audio recording with webrtc to improve it.

------
dharma1
google drawing -> setup share settings so anyone with link can edit ->
scribble

[https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/11ZmEeCZa_2pAwe9KjHDoAOOK...](https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/11ZmEeCZa_2pAwe9KjHDoAOOKLaBn-C769WahOYr4kmE/edit)

------
megablast
Did something like this myself, a few years ago:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/remote-
whiteboard/id52213886...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/remote-
whiteboard/id522138867?mt=8)

Except all you need to follow along is a browser.

------
bitJericho
I played around with something like this when I was a kid (it was a group of
kids drawing anime characters if I recall). Every once in a while I search for
something like that and I can never find it. Now it's back :D

~~~
cpncrunch
Try searching for 'online whiteboard' and you'll find lots of them :)

~~~
bitJericho
Hmm maybe I wasn't searching hard enough :D

------
shervinshaikh
This looks similar to Citrix's Talkboard
[http://www.citrix.com/products/talkboard/overview.html](http://www.citrix.com/products/talkboard/overview.html)

------
jacquesm
My quick-and-dirty hack for a one way version of this is to open skype using
screen sharing and then to run 'gimp' while using the chat & voice for
instruction/questions.

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niix
Reminds me of
[http://www.citrix.com/products/talkboard/overview.html](http://www.citrix.com/products/talkboard/overview.html)

------
DanBlake
I did something like this a few years ago, but we were forced to use flash-
[http://flockdraw.com](http://flockdraw.com)

~~~
cpncrunch
Why were you forced? html5 was around at the time (and in fact twiddla was
launched two years before flockdraw).

~~~
lunixbochs
Open the same Flockdraw URL in two side-by side windows and draw in one of
them. Compare that to the WhiteboardFox video or Twiddla demo.

WhiteboardFox says a few seconds is "fast syncing". Flockdraw's sync is
realtime (try it for yourself).

The kind of latency and overhead I wanted when building Flockdraw is only
really feasible in JS when using WebSockets (which wasn't even fully
standardized until 2011) but was doable in Flash in 2009.

------
josealicarte
This article was awesome, teaching remotely are very effective because other
people are busy , they dont have time to go institution.

------
itry
come draw with me:

[http://whiteboardfox.com/3341-4061-6898](http://whiteboardfox.com/3341-4061-6898)

~~~
itry
oh, it was a lot of fun until somebody erased everything.

~~~
kuschku
Yeah, I almost finished my drawing of Elsa (from Disney's Frozen) :/

------
joebo
nicely done. I will try using it with my coworkers. The video was helpful with
suggestions on zooming to draw text.

------
hoof_marks
Awesome!!..with tablet. You can add text support, and login with email
id..dont have facebook!

------
free2rhyme214
My only suggestion is to make sure the youtube video plays in HD by default.
Excellent work!

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orcinusorca
Very well done. I can see myself using this in the near future. Thank you for
making this.

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samstave
There should be an "omeagle" version of this where you draw pics with
strangers.

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gavinpc
Doesn't work if cookies are blocked. Well, it is a "white board," anyway.

------
eldelshell
Very nice, but you just made me remember how hard it's to draw with a mouse.

------
sidcool
Very impressed Mark. Nicely done. Do you mind telling the technology stack?

~~~
EngVagabond
He has commented below that the 'front end is GWT, back end is Java servlets.
Database was originally MySQL but switched to Prevayler for performance
reasons.'

I have built a similar tool that is also an HTML5 / Canvas collaborative
drawing app which uses Google Drive for storage and has no server code beyond
that. It works offline (and syncs up with collaborators when you come online)
and runs in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, iOS, and Android and supports touch.
[http://thesavior.github.io/draw/](http://thesavior.github.io/draw/)

~~~
thanesh
you have to login?

~~~
EngVagabond
It uses Google Drive for cloud file storage (syncing and sharing)

------
Brandon0
This is very cool! Is there a way to zoom in on desktop? Mouse wheel perhaps?

~~~
MarkMc
Yes - click the Options button

------
jiri
Very nice! I gonna use it myself for drawing using tablet on big screen!

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har777
Great stuff ! I'll try to build my own version using socket.io :)

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freebs
Making it easier to zoom would be nice. Maybe with scrolling?

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j2kun
A simple chat functionality within the app would be nice...

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ujjwal_wadhawan
A zoom in/out with mouse scroll would be good to have.

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junyeeng
How long do you take to complete the project? Awesome work!

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dblacc
This is fantastic. How long is a whiteboards lifetime ?

~~~
MarkMc
Thanks :)

A whiteboard lasts 30 days at the moment, but that number may change in future

~~~
bitJericho
Is that from the last date of use?

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johnmoore
Only works in Internet Explorer 9, doesn't work in IE 8 in some companies they
only allow you to use IE only and only upgrade the browser if they install a
new OS.

~~~
rstupek
If you're on IE 8, you have bigger issues than this working for you.

~~~
johnmoore
My work mate is using IE8 I am using IE9 just happened to try it out. But
found out you can do the same thing in microsoft lync which I didn't know you
could do.

------
cdnsteve
Interesting, seems like TogetherJs or Prezi.

------
khrist
very nice, responsive. Great job. I was looking for such tool. Feature
request, should allow copy paste :).

------
mentos
Might this use Firebase?

------
Duber
looks good to me, congratulations

------
lazyant
great! only missing typing text

~~~
caente
I don't think this should have typing of any kind. I think it will be faster
and easier if stays as it is. The focus should be in making it even more
reactive/real time.

We might start using it right away :-)

