Comment by markbao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by markbao | Hacker News Reader

Ok, that's an awesome collaborative whiteboard. Nice to propose a simple UI for it. Suggestions:

1. Manual save, on the toolbar. For the savaholics!

2. It's somewhat fast at refreshing, but have a dedicated Refresh button on the toolbar, not under the Share panel. If I'm working with some friends and they're all editing, I want to refresh it. Kind of like when you know Twhirl/any other desktop Twitter client is going to fetch new tweets automatically, but you still feel like refreshing.

2.1. Alternatively, let me move the Share Panel around. This could be an option you implement in conjunction with the above.

2.2. Alternatively, have a refresh button only when the document is shared.

3. When you save current document automatically, show it in the documents dock, just to give people reassurance, and to familiarize them with the UI.

4. Anglular (Z, etc) vectors turn into angles, not rectangles.

4.1. Freehand mode by default.

--EDIT--

5. I realize it's hard (with regard to the sharing and synchronization of the whiteboard shared users), and probably something to think about for the future, but uploading of images to use as objects would be extremely useful in, say, mocking up UIs collaboratively, or diagramming.

6. Maybe make the text feature more noticeable by making a text tool button on the toolbar. Most people will learn using the app by trying it, not by watching the video. (I didn't, at least.)

This is impressive. Great work with it, I will be definitely using it!

I think that it should stay in the auto-shape mode by default. Its really the killer feature of your product and I'd keep it that way.

If you added a sick & quick way to do circuit diagrams, a lot of EE students would love you. They might not pay a lot for it, but you'd get their mindshare. * I know the shared library feature is for that. Somebody would make a bunch of circuit elements and I could use them. For circuits, thinner lines would be necessary (or less fuzzy lines at least).

Thanks! As a EE myself, the ideal feature for circuit diagrams would be "auto right-angle route and connect" (hope that made sense). Visio/Omnigraffle have this. I wonder how many non-EEs (or non-techies) would need that.

Wow that was amazingly fast feedback! Thanks!

1. Good idea, was considering that anyway as a way to reduce my database load, as opposed to saving every 4 seconds (if you change the drawing) which is what I'm currently doing. (I'm a hardware engineer and this is my first webapp: I just found out writes to the database are really really slow. Will explore memcached optimizations too.)

2. The intent of the refresh button is for when you're sharing the drawing with others (I initially wanted realtime refresh, but got worried about performance). Hence I put the button under the share panel. But I guess you're right, you would need to refresh more often than you'd need to see who else you're sharing with or to add people for sharing...

2.1 This should be trivial. Will do :).

3. (Not sure if you saw the video or already know this.) The pane on the left is the library pane (or "documents dock") that shows all your saved drawings. The idea is the current drawing is just like any other drawing in the library, just that it's got the focus for now. Or is this idea non-intuitive?

4. The issue is how often would you want to draw angular vectors, compared to rectangles. As an "optimization" for the UI, I allow users to draw a rectangle with just 2 sides rather than all 4 sides (which also works), because I expect them to be very common.

Thanks so much for the feedback! And I'm elated that you'd actually use it!

EDIT

5. You're the third person that asked for this feature, so now it's on my near-term to-do list. I don't think it's hard; just to eat the cost of the bandwidth and storage (which currently is very low).

6. Hmmm... I personally hate revisiting the toolbar each time I have to enter text, so I don't (yet) agree. This is on my "wait for more users to ask for this feature" list :).

1. I'd also expect that database writes are ridiculously slow when you're talking realish-time collaboration.

3. Got your point. I noticed that it was only pushing the current document to the documents pane when I was creating a new document. I'm used to the Google Docs approach - that is, if you make a new document and change it, it'll be in your documents, saved. Maybe, though, your approach may work better in this aspect.

4. Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's only a problem if you're a new user and are just messing around with it, the real usage of angular vectors is probably very little :)

No problem - best of luck!

EDIT -

6. That's true - definitely agree with you there.

6. I jumped right in without watching the video, and I got pretty frustrated when I wanted to type text and didn't see a toolbar option. I didn't even think about just typing. I do think you should add it, then "power users" will figure out that you can just start typing.

It might be funny and intuitive to put a text button on the toolbar and when it's clicked display a large hint on-screen saying something like:

"You can add text anywhere just by clicking and start to type. So no need for this pesky button!"

And then fade the text button away or even better destroy it with an explosion animation and then keep track of it in the session/user login.

I actually got how to use the text straight away - Please don't change that to force people to use the tool bar to put it into text mode - that would be very frustrating!

mocking up UIs collaboratively

sounds cool, especially if it's live

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