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Comment by montroser | Hacker News Reader

This is a cool start. There is quite a lot you can express with boxes and arrows that doesn't really lend itself nearly as well to any other format.

That said, in real-world video calls I've found that having the whiteboard be collaborative is essential. Being able to see a colleague's mouse cursor as they're asking a question out loud, or someone else being able to draw a little alternate part of the diagram right there -- this stuff can make technical planning discussions way more productive.

We started with https://miro.com, and then moved to https://beta.plectica.com for our diagrams / whiteboarding. Both are pretty great...

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It's certainly helpful to see more of the great tools in this space, and I appreciate you sharing those.

I prefer collaborative editing for meetings as well, but my use case for this is more academic. I'm using it as a stand-in for a board that I'd usually use at the front of the classroom to make a quick diagrams or notes during a lecture, so collaboration isn't especially important to me. I simply wanted something clean and distraction-free.

It'd be sweet to add collaboration to this, but that's obviously an order of magnitude more complicated than what I've built. Perhaps I'll get around to it eventually.

Do you remember why you moved away from Miro? (I am developing a whiteboard software)

We found that we were often essentially making lists inside of top-level boxes.

With Miro you basically just get bulleted text lists, which is fine but only gets you so far.

With Plectica you can nest cards inside of cards, which means you can drag drop to re-order, give nested cards their own tags, etc.

So for things like modeling a db schema (lists of columns in tables, each column with its own attributes) or planning user stories (lists of tasks to support use cases, each task with its own parameters etc), Plectica is just really flexible / extensible.

Curious to know - why did you move from Miro to Plectica?

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