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.
> 2. Does the eraser on the back of my pen work? (If not, it’s very frustrating and a very bad sign.)
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.
Not all styli have erasers, but a very substantial fraction do. Detecting it is a basic operation when you’re using the Pointer Events API (event.button == 5 and event.buttons &== 32). I use not supporting this as a proxy for other basic errors of implementation, such as using mouse events instead of pointer events. This is why I say it’s a very bad sign. It’s a simple thing that I can point at and say, “this thing is half-baked; they have very probably done a bad job”, without needing to go through a larger battery of comparative and subjective tests.
The eraser not working is a sign the app hasn't been thought out from the perspective of graphic tablet users, which would likely be a pretty major target demographic.
Sure, but not to the level of a "very bad sign". Especially when the whole thing is sluggish to begin with and seems to be struggling with far more basic operational tasks.
If it's sluggish to begin with and fails basic operational tasks, sure, it doesn't matter that much whether the eraser works—because it hasn't even met the low bar to be judged on its tablet functionality at all.
> Browserboard is the worst of the three: hideous latency, terrible accuracy, missing the start and end of each stroke, and fails all three.
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.
Mr.doob's multiuser sketchpad has the essentials as far as real-time sharing and drawing capacity. It would work very well in private mode: you could share a link to start recording a live session.
As soon as I put my pen to the surface and made a big sweeping movement, it popped up five or ten alerts in a row, all reading “please, draw slowly”, and broke (the socket disconnected and stayed disconnected). Um. When I drew things small, this didn’t happen, but it was as badly broken as Browserboard in that it wasn’t registering the first (and maybe last?) short time of each stroke, which makes it completely useless for writing. So, total failure of #1, and #2 and #3 seem inapplicable by design so I can’t judge them. But I’m not in the slightest bit impressed with this, functionally.
No idea. I’ve never needed a collaborative whiteboard, and for non-collaborative use I haven’t found anything on the web anywhere near as good as the desktop options of Microsoft Whiteboard and Krita (though Krita has a definite learning curve), so on the odd occasions I want to share things with others I just do screen sharing of these. I started making one of my own a few years back and had the basic interactions down pat, but shelved that project before it ever got really good or could have supported collaboration. Mine was also bitmap-based rather than vector-based, which is a significant difference in approach in some regards, losing you some functionality but gaining you a lot of speed.
More of an input for developers than actual suggestion but collaborative art boards like MagicalDraw[1] aren't new among digital artists and they're quite robust
I... think back then(tm) those web apps used to run as Java Applet or Flash, then switched to HTML5 when those were obsoleted and while Firefox was still struggling to modernize.
No it should definitely not. I really see this as an extra tool you use when you are already in a call with people, And if you don't like the Microsoft teams / zoom culture just use https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ its free and opensource and works just by sharing a url.
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.