

Woobius introduces: the Eye - swombat
http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/posts/0027-woobius-eye.html

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lambdom
It seems really useful. I would use it with no-tech people. One thing I
disliked thought: The sound of the pen drawing on the board. I'm not a native
english speaker and I'm not sure how to say it.. but that sound "freeze my
back" - the same feeling as one might have with a chalk on a board.

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icey
The phrase you're looking for is "sends chills up my spine".

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ryandvm
I like "freezes my back" better.

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ezy
This needs to be more than just a whiteboard, and it needs iPhone/iPad apps
ASAP.

a) What does this have over Microsoft NetMeeting?

b) What does this have over Abode Connect Pro?

c) Drawing with the mouse sucks

d) Writing with the mouse sucks

e) Placing text boxes sucks

f) Most conferences use pre-prepared slides (that you might annotate), having
to screen cap each one in sequence is clunky.

g) Easy screen sharing duplicates of 95% of this app's utility. Why not do
that and allow annotations _on top_?

I don't want to be a complete downer. But this needs to be much, much better
than it currently is. Possibly the only advantage you have is an iPhone/Ipad
interface to the whiteboard -- I would make that the highest priority.

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cliffrowley
I think you've missed the point, It's not meant to be a netmeeting, or connect
pro :-) In fact, it's not supposed to be a tool that you pre-prepare
necessarily. As the article says, it's a tool that you can use impromptu: in
an "oh ok, look at this.. _click_ " kind of way.

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ezy
I got that, but that isn't enough. IM is almost as convenient. Again, I'm not
trying to be contrarian here, I'm just saying it's not convenient if it's not
useful. I don't think mouse drawing is useful. Maybe when more features come
online I'll change my opinion... :-)

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cliffrowley
I agree it isn't enough for all situations, but in those situations you're
better off using a tool that is appropriate rather than shoe-horning a tool
that isn't. Yes, IM is convenient, and if you are in a situation where you and
the person you are talking to are both already using (or have instant access
to) a tool that does the job, then of course you should use it (after all,
that's the most convenient thing to do!).

But if you're on the phone, or talking via an IM service that doesn't have a
white board, or if in any situation you simply need to illustrate and annotate
a conversation live, then the Eye is just a couple of clicks away.

It's feature incomplete - we know that, but rather than throw in features
simply because that's what we (and others) might expect, we'd like to work
with it and the people who use it and make it as useful as we can.

Thanks for taking the time to respond :-)

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swombat
Hey everyone,

Would love to have your comments on this new tool that we've just launched
into public beta now. How would you use it? Would you use it? Is it useful?

And in general, what do you think of it? Any feedback is welcome.

Direct link to the new tool: <http://woobiuseye.com>

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jonas_b
iPad app?

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swombat
Yes, definitely on the plans.

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pmjordan
I've just watched the demo video, and I really like your UI for taking
screenshots. Other than that, there have been many "shared whiteboard"
implementations, many of them in Flash, over the years, which haven't really
taken off massively - probably because drawing with a mouse is hard. I know
Woobius targets architects, etc. - I assume they use tablets, and it could
work really well with those.

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mortuus
I thought "Take Screenshot" was going to save my scribbles to a file. This is
a cool feature though, I could imagine using it for captioning random stuff on
the web...that said, I'd want to be able to download/share my image when I'm
done with it.

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cliffrowley
Yep, that's coming very soon!

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chaosmachine
This looks like Netmeeting whiteboard, which came with Windows 95.

<http://imgur.com/dBP1u.gif>

[http://i.technet.microsoft.com/Cc723477.nm3feat2%28en-
us,Tec...](http://i.technet.microsoft.com/Cc723477.nm3feat2%28en-
us,TechNet.10%29.gif)

Netmeeting also had video conferencing and chat to go with it, though.

[http://www.microsoft.com/PRODUCTS/internet/netmeeting/demo/w...](http://www.microsoft.com/PRODUCTS/internet/netmeeting/demo/whitebd/Wht1.GIF)

Maybe you could partner with Chat Roulette ;)

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ultimatt42
There are plenty of standalone apps for videoconferencing. I don't think
there's any need to package it with a whiteboard app unless you can come up
with an innovative way to integrate the video with the whiteboard (indexing
video frames to scribbles, maybe?)

In my experience, having a video feed is pretty much worthless for
productivity; if anything, it's distracting. Much more useful is having voice
chat and the ability to share files seamlessly. Again, these are needs that
can be adequately fulfilled by Google Docs, Google Talk, Skype, etc, so
there's no reason to reinvent the wheel.

~~~
cliffrowley
This is exactly the approach we're going for. We're a distributed team and
have been since the start, and over the past two years we've used a variety of
weird and wonderful tools to enhance the communication between us.

While video conferencing is nice, we've never found it really adds that much
value to our conversations unless we're show & telling. Screen sharing can be
useful but it doesn't lend itself well to a fluid two-way conversation (only
one person can control a computer/cursor/keyboard at once), and it's generally
not instantly available - if we're already talking on the telephone we have to
switch tools entirely, and if we're talking to someone outside our team it's
pretty much pot luck as to whether they'll already have access to the same
services we do.

We wanted something with zero setup. No registration, no downloads/installs,
no login.. Maybe when HTML5 is implemented uniformly across all major browsers
we can drop the requirement for any 3rd party software at all.

It's an add-on to your existing workflow, rather than a workflow of its own.

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sonpo
Nice product. Making it easy to use/launch sounds like a big plus to me. I
originally thought this had actual voice chat along with the visual element,
but that's not the case, is it? Oh well - bummer.

One use case that could prove useful for me: I can see using this to help
design UI on distributed teams - rather than creating or modifying screenshots
and sending back and forth, you could mark up ideas at the same time.

In the demo, were you guys writing on a Wacom type of device or something? I
can never write that nicely with a mouse or trackpad!

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swombat
We were indeed using a Wacom tablet for this demo, but we have an text tool on
the way, which should help those of us (such as me!) who are biologically
incapable of drawing letters with a mouse (and even sometimes with a pen)...

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pchristensen
That is a really, really good demo video. It helps that it's a really good
looking product as well.

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ianbishop
This is something that could definitely be useful but I don't know if I like
the idea of having to write everything in pen, couldn't there be some sort of
plain-text chat option?

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swombat
There will be - we're working on a text tool.

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nickwsmith
I could see this being turned into a fun game - sketchroulette?

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cfpg
I remember seeing a website like that, it was a "multiplayer flash whiteboard"
and dozens of people were connected at any given time. It was mostly full of
penises and other sexual drawings, as you would expected.

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Osmose
<http://www.groupboard.com/products/>

Oh the memories. :D

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callmeed
No one (that I know) can write letters that fast or that well with their
mouse. I think a text tool (like you'd find in Skitch) would be better.

Also, webcam integration would be nice.

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cliffrowley
We're working on a text tool right now.

As for integration with webcams and such - being able to use Eye with your
_current_ tools is fundamental to the idea. We didn't want to reinvent the
wheel and provide everything in 1 box.

You should be able to pick it up half way through a telephone conversation for
e.g. and explain something with it.

If you need a webcam while you talk, you need a video conference, and there
are plenty of tools already out there for that :-)

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Musashi
A very cool product with plenty of real business uses! Well done!

