Ask Slashdot: Whiteboard Substitutes For Distributed Teams? 164
DoofusOfDeath writes I work on a fully distributed software development team with 5-10 people. Normally it's great, but when we're doing heavy design work, we really need to all be standing in front of a whiteboard together. This is expensive and time consuming, because it involves airplanes and hotels. Conference calls, editing shared Google docs, etc. just don't seem to be the same. Have people found any good tools or practices to replace standing in front of a real whiteboard?
White board is and will always be the best way (Score:2, Insightful)
sorry, but we are physical beings.
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And thats what he's asking for, but distributed.
This is not a new question, comes up in my office rather often as we have a lot of teams working from different parts of the world. I'm curious as to see what others have to say myself as we've considered a side project to create a distributed whiteboard that doesn't suck ourselves.
One that shares the display between more than one location, as well as does neat things like letting you export documents from the drawings such as flowcharts and things like that.
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Well, its ... a lot more complicated than that, but yes, except no one has made the large touch screen that you plugin to the LAN and it just does that ... yet.
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Well, its ... a lot more complicated than that, but yes, except no one has made the large touch screen that you plugin to the LAN and it just does that ... yet.
Isn't that what Smart Podium does?
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Re: White board is and will always be the best way (Score:2)
I'm surprised by how expensive they are ($1000). There was a push to get them in schools in Britain starting around 2002-3, and the three schools I've seen in the last couple of years have had them in every room.
They're accurate enough for my Chinese evening class. Share a screen with MS Paint, and get a decent conference microphone.
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I'm pretty sure any distributed solution is going to need to be connected to a computer. The computer is probably going to be much less than the board itself, those things are pricey.
http://smarttech.com/Home+Page/Solutions/~/link.aspx?_id=BCF4121A410B48A79C89A8700775DC8B&_z=z
Seems like this is exactly what the OP needs, although it's not clear if they all work at home which would make it a lot more expensive.
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no one has made the large touch screen that you plugin to the LAN and it just does that ...
Sure they have -
http://smarttech.com/Home+Page... [smarttech.com]
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There's also the potential to use a wii with a VGA projector.
http://johnnylee.net/projects/... [johnnylee.net]
Put the wiimote on the podium facing the screen, so the wiimote's sensor can detect your laser pointer. Then point at the screen where you want to draw.
It's a wiii homebrew, so you need a hacked wii--- but otherwise, this looks pretty damned low cost.
Does this ever actually work? (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, asking Slashdot? All you're going to get is a bunch of snarky comments and a holy war or two.
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Really, asking Slashdot? All you're going to get is a bunch of snarky comments and a holy war or two.
I, for one, welcome our blue and black SystemD overlords.
SpecLog (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'm sorry, but your post is as useless as a marketing blurb. You've said nothing about how one actually interacts with that software.Is it like a whiteboard, with just a single area where erveryone interacts? at the same time? Or are multiple there pages? Is there a moderator when one collaborates, or can anyone just draw/write, paste into the same "document"? What platforms does it run on? Does it support video conferencing at the same time, or at least audio, or does one need a separate solution for that?
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I'll answer your questions as best I can.
SpecLog is a Windows/.NET 4.0 application. As far as I'm aware it only runs via Windows, but it has several export options for HTML, PDF, or spreadsheets. It also connects to a Microsoft SQL Server on
OpenMeetings (Score:4, Interesting)
Ever tried OpenMeetings (http://openmeetings.apache.org)? It has a whiteboard in it and I have been in group discussions using it, voice and video. Not as good as a face to face but better than having to travel especially when weather makes it difficult. I think Google Hangouts does something like that too but have not tried it.
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Similar is Big Blue Button (a google summer of code project) - whiteboard functionality, upload files and do the "john madden football commentator thing" to them, voice and cam sharing, ability to mute, etc. And can be set up to record meetings/conferences/etc. Tested it a while back stand-along on a linode that would be $10/mo now (it was a $20/mo plan then), and it was enough to support 15 users at once as long as they all weren't connected via the same wireless link to the LAN to get out to the World
Rocketboard (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.rocketboard.it/
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Oooh, nice.
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Another vote for Rocketboard here. It's not 2-way sharing, but I'm not sure if you need that or not. What it does for whiteboard broadcasting and saving, though, is excellent!
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It's simple, easy to use, and free.
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In my own (quite extensive) experience working in distributed teams, you're almost never going to find the entire team using OS X; it's a near certainty that all OSs will be represented, so a single-platform solution is a non-starter, no matter how good it may be.
It really depends on what your budget is and how distributed your team is. If there are only 2-3 different locations
then getting a couple dedicated OS X boxes just for a distributed whiteboard would be worth it.
I also work on a distributed team and I have considered spending a weekend playing with the wii remote hack to
see if I could get it working as a whiteboard. 40" lcds are cheap enough that if it actually worked, I could easily
justifying buying one for everyone on the team (but I probably wouldn't ha
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In my own (quite extensive) experience working in distributed teams, you're almost never going to find the entire team using OS X; it's a near certainty that all OSs will be represented, so a single-platform solution is a non-starter, no matter how good it may be.
I don't know that I'd agree with "almost never". In my own experience, also extensive, and also distributed, most of the people I have had need to use a whiteboard with were already using OS X. It has a disproportionate presence among developers, although Apple lately seems less willing to support its developer base.
At the same time, I won't pretend that my own experience represents the typical situation. I'm not going to claim it's everybody's thing. Which is why I wrote "IF you're on OS X..."
How about using a whiteboard? (Score:5, Informative)
No, seriously.
I know I've seen systems that use sensors you mount around the edge of a whiteboard and special markers to track where you are drawing and reproduce it electronically on remote monitors -- it's on a cheap system, but it's cheaper than flying people in airplanes all over the place.
You could also just have the whiteboard person use a graphics tablet, and skip the big arm movements.
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whoops. meant to say the electronic whiteboard scanner is *not a cheap system.
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We use two E-Beam Edges, one in the US (with projector) and one in the UK (large TV).
I'm pretty happy with them - I'd recommend them.
Coupled with video-conferencing using TelyHD gives use an effective remote office presence in the UK.
It means I can still participate in interactive design meetings while I'm in the UK.
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Seriously? Digital whiteboard? How does the other side touch it?
In this day and age of tablet ubiquity, it's the ONE THING they should be nailing perfectly. There should be a couple "standard" protocols or apps for this (though I won't hold my breath... the main text chat clients/protocols don't interoperate, so who would expect anything more complicated to work).
Every time I go to look for a whiteboard solution (networked and multi-user), I'm amazed that the old solutions are no longer around, and there's
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Seriously? Digital whiteboard? How does the other side touch it?
That was a trick question right? If the other side also has a digital whiteboard then they can scribble on the same image.
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I picked a really poor phrase there. See the comment one above mine: "I know I've seen systems that use sensors you mount around the edge of a whiteboard and special markers to track where you are drawing and reproduce it electronically on remote monitors"
In those cases, they are one way systems. You can setup another going the other direction, but it's not a shared whiteboard. The remote end can't tell your markers to draw on your board.
There are ones that use a projector and fake makers (ie. a marker shap
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Compatibility issues is not something I've seen. The whiteboards we use (Hitachi Starboards at our end, some Sharp at one of the other locations, and I'm not sure about the rest of the company) are input devices, windows treats them as a tablet device nothing more. They are glorified projectors with pen input.
Any collaboration software which will allow shared drawing on a single canvas works on these boards. Sure you get extra features if you use a specific manufacturer's own software like quick changing co
Very simple solution (Score:1)
Buy tablets and have someone host a shared VNC session of mspaint.
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Ladybug (Score:1)
In eons past, I used Coccinella [thecoccinella.org] against my own jabber server. Free software, but a bit stale now.
Whiteboards and whiteboarding are a bad idea. (Score:3, Funny)
Whiteboarding is a symptom of a greater problem: the inability to properly break down concepts into simpler concepts.
Some may say that whiteboards are a tool to enable this, but that's never the case. Whiteboarding does the opposite. It allows the most vocal participants to add complexity to a situation.
If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly. Drawing pictures on a whiteboard won't help with this.
In fact, it makes the situation even worse. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. More words are exactly what we're trying to avoid. We need fewer pictures, and hence fewer words to describe the concepts at hand.
Anyone who has worked with UML and any real programming language will know that this is true. One UML diagram can result in hundreds of thousands of lines of unnecessary Java code. Often that same Java code could, if written sensibly, take up less than a few hundred lines.
Re:Whiteboards and whiteboarding are a bad idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly
A picture is worth a thousand words, FOR A REASON.
And you're an idiot.
I don't need to write a manuscript to describe an abstract problem when a couple boxes and some lines will do the same thing. That doesn't mean I've given exact specifications for a problem either.
Anyone who has worked with UML and any real programming language will know that this is true. One UML diagram can result in hundreds of thousands of lines of unnecessary Java code.
Anyone who has worked with UML and thinks you convert that to code doesn't understand code, they've just bought into the UML hype (thats still happening? WTF I thought it died 15 years ago). You seem to think the drawing is the code, and again, you're an idiot. The drawing is a way to describe whats happening in an abstract way so others have a general idea of the concept. It IS NOT the code, its abstract logic.
UML and Java ... you pretty much showed in that little blurb you're not qualified to be part of this discussion. Go back to being a middle manager who doesn't know anything about software design or actually writing code.
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In the Real World, Java is the most widely used programming language, and will be for some time. C#, which is a lot like Java, is close behind.
We hear a lot about Ruby and Go and Rust these days, but they see very limited use. The only reason we hear a lot about them is because there are a lot of unemployed people who have lots of time to sit around yelling about how great these technologies are.
UML is still used, too, especially for larger projects. If you're the kind of person who only ever works on simpl
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Excuse me, but WTF does Oracle have to do with power companies?
A lot of power companies run Oracle DB, but that's all I've ever seen. I saw one that used Apps for a little while. But once the decision maker went on the her no show job at Oracle, everybody realized just how hard they had just gotten fucked.
1/3 of American power was traded on an Access app (for years). Until we drove a wooden stake through it's heart. Don't laugh Europeans/Australians, I've got bad news for you also.
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I'll need you to state that with a picture.
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Pictures and text. Both are required.
I've seen "specs" that consisted solely of a bunch of pictures and high-level diagrams, where I would have had to be a mind-reader to figure out what was going on at the detail level. In these cases, text would have gone a long way toward explaining some of the more subtle details of an interaction/procedure/design.
I've also seen "specs" that were a giant wall of text, where I had to get out a whiteboard and draw on my own because a human being couldn't possibly keep the
Re:Whiteboards and whiteboarding are a bad idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly.
...and at the planning stage, you are still trying to break down the problem. The core concept behind team thinking is that individually, we often fail to analyse the situation completely, and input from others can show holes in our reasoning and things we've failed to properly consider. The whole, hopefully, is greater than the sum of its parts.
I'm coding alone at the moment, and because I have no-one to bounce ideas off, I frequently find myself heading into dead-ends because the problem domain I'm dealing with is very large, and as there's no-one to discuss things with, I need to prototype to find my mistakes. Then I have to go back and rewrite.
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I'm coding alone at the moment, and because I have no-one to bounce ideas off, I frequently find myself heading into dead-ends because the problem domain I'm dealing with is very large, and as there's no-one to discuss things with, I need to prototype to find my mistakes. Then I have to go back and rewrite.
Start with a partner or friends. If it's about UI issues or related things, they don't need to be programmers or versed deep into the problem at hand. People that know nothing about it actually can at times give you the best ideas, exactly because they know nothing about it and haven't yet restricted their minds by thinking about it. The programmatic implementation itself of course you have to do yourself, but that's generally the straightforward part (after you properly defined the problem, and the solutio
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The programmatic implementation itself of course you have to do yourself, but that's generally the straightforward part
I'm working in natural language processing for generating parallel equivalent text in multiple languages.
(after you properly defined the problem, and the solution you want to work towards).
That's a bit circular though, because my difficulty is properly defining the problem, or rather the set of all subproblems, and the solution(s). It's easy to implement once you know what you're doing, but if we all knew what we were doing, there'd be much less buggy software out there....
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If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly. Drawing pictures on a whiteboard won't help with this.
And you should be able to compose great music via sheet music alone, but it might be a good idea to actually listen to your music.
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If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly. Drawing pictures on a whiteboard won't help with this.
Feynman diagrams?
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yeah it's always bad when vocal participants like the client(product owner whatever) wants to add complexity to actually make the product do what it is supposed to do..
and if you actually make an uml diagram that results in hundreds of thousands of lines of java code that does the same thing as 100 lines then you have fucked up quite badly in both making the uml diagram and writing the code.
I think the OP was asking for a solution to do just high level design anyhow, to slash up the work into smaller logica
online whiteboard? (Score:1)
Try Mural.ly
lifesize video conference (Score:4, Interesting)
I have used pretty much every tool out there skype, goto meeting hangouts to name the more popular ones. But when I did some work with E-bay a while back I got a chance to work with their lifesize system. The camera the screen the high definition and the lack of lag come together to make something far better then anything else I used. I suspect they charge an arm and a leg for such a setup but it works. (I have no financial intrest in lifesize )
A couple solutions (Score:4, Insightful)
2) For a bulletin board todo list, use www.Trello.com
I love telecommuting work, it feels more efficient than in person office work.
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Drawing on a computer is far slower than grabbing a marker and doing it on the whiteboard. You ever try writing text with a mouse?
Whiteboards are NOT FOR CODE, I think thats another problem you're having. You draw flowcharts and make notes on the whiteboard, not write down code that then gets transcribed and compiled.
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I agree, a mouse is horrible to draw with. A few people have mentioned Wacom tables. There are even models available with a built-in screen, for example, which makes it pretty easy for anyone to draw right on it with little training. It's normally used mostly by digital artists, but I could see it being useful for digital whiteboard sessions as well. It's also superior to tablets in that it's optimized for pen use rather than finger touches, which makes it much more precise for actually drawing.
MS Surface Pro (Score:2)
Who said anything about a mouse? People write with a whiteboard marker, or in its digital form, a stylus.
A number of years ago I worked for an organisation where people took notes in meetings using a Panasonic Toughbook. The software for the forthcoming Windows 10 is, hopefully, a lot more sophisticated than XP tablet edition as MS tune their software for touch/scribble.
Combination of Lync and Wacom Tablet... (Score:4, Interesting)
We use the combination of Microsoft Lync, where you can start a common whiteboard, and a Wacom Tablet, so you can do some freehand drawing.
It is not free. But the cost is offset after one meeting with members from all over the world...
Multiple whiteboards + Google Hangout (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, so the submitter asked for "good" solutions, and this may not qualify, but it's what I do: A whiteboard at each location, with a camera pointed at it. I can't draw on your drawing, but I can see what you draw, and you can see what I draw. I've experimented with various web-based shared whiteboards, but they all require drawing on the computer. Even with a tablet (either Wacom-style attached to a laptop/PC or a mobile device) and a pen, a real whiteboard is better.
In my case, generally there are at most three locations in the meeting, and usually only two: My home office and a group of people in a conference room. Having more may make the "real whiteboards" solution less effective.
Electronic White Boards (Score:3)
http://smarttech.com/Home+Page/Solutions/Business+Solutions?WT.ac=homepage_bus [smarttech.com]
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This. I use electronic whiteboards at work. The ability to share a session in the software is great. It works just like a real whiteboard except with more features and the ability for people in distributed locations to write on the same board in the same meeting is well worth it.
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I've seen this one in action and it works really well. It's not a touchscreen like those on your phone, the screen edges work like a camera to find where your fingers and where the pens are. It works like a normal screen attached to your PC and then there's a Windows application that lets you make annotations beyond what the normal OCR and OneNote drawings allow. I'm trying to get my company to buy at least one of these.
They also have smart whiteboards that scan their content and broadcast it to mobile phon
I'd bet surface hub would work well for this when (Score:2, Funny)
probably will be expensive but does exactly what you are asking for
Try to meet in person (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no substitute for meeting in person. We've evolved over millions of years to meet with each other in person. Every distributed meeting I've ever attended has had yelling, mumbling, and misheard things caused by technological failures.
If you're sketching out your next year's worth of work, spend the money and get together for it.
If you're just talking about a couple of minor issues, then by all means use a distributed whiteboard.
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Yeah, a telephone is no substitute for talking in person. Tell Bell his invention sucks.
Video conference stuff all sucks, as you can't smell the other people. (or offer to meet them in a motel afterwards)
People have evolved to meet in person only.
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Exactly. What people also forget is that it's not just about the whiteboard, it's at least as much about the beers afterwards. Getting to know your colleagues in person helps a lot in getting cooperation going (it helps you interpret the writing in their e-mails properly, for example).
There is no real substitute for in-person meetings. And considering the problem at hand has already the budget of flying people around to get it solved, you'd better make use of it.
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Mural.ly (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked on a product that tried to solve this problem... It's but super expensive and not very well executed: Bluescape.com. There are youtube videos showing it in action.
The best thing out there I've seen is mural.ly
Re: Mural.ly (Score:2)
Yeah, Mural.ly is great, but more of a sketchboarding solution (like BoardThing) than a shared whiteboard.
Would gladly use mural.ly if the team would adopt it.
Messaging problem hiding as a whiteboard problem (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem you're having isn't a whiteboard issue. It's not technology. It's that you're only getting half the message.
You may not be aware of it, but person-to-person communication is extremely high bandwidth. It's so high that we rarely even recognize the component parts of it, and only come up with little more than a mux generalization, like "they're angry" or "they're unsure". Our minds look at someone's stance and posture, at the speed they're blinking, where their eyes are looking, whether or not there's a nearly imperceptible pause when they're about to say certain words, subconscious muscle tics, and so on, and it passes through this great big neural net and some sort of amazing transformation happens and we get discrete knowledge out the other end. What's more, what they're doing is always going to partially be a response to what we're doing; we're providing real time feedback and both of us are adjusting ourselves accordingly. We're so good at it, that about 5 words into an introduction, we can usually tell if someone likes us or not.
On the other hand, a digital whiteboard, even with audio and video, we can't attempt to get this nuance or the feedback response that a person-to-person meeting allows. There's no way to send that much information successfully.
That's why no digital whiteboard will ever beat the real thing. Because these solutions do not allow you to see each varied nuance and react to them, and allow the other parties to do the same in turn. That's why a person-to-person meeting takes 5 minutes to cover what would go 30 minutes in a phone call. Or why video calls always seem to take far more time than you've allocated. That's why all those business types are always doing face to face meetings and ignoring 90% of our technical advances down here in the trenches of engineering, where we're trying not only to solve a problem with technology poorly, but we're not even aware of what the problem actually is.
Let me sum it up for you; there is no technological replacement that comes close to the clarity and efficiency possible - and likely - in a face to face.
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Those bits of communication that only come through face to face can be substituted by more technology. Someone in a teleconference doesn't need to read my facial expression when drawing if I then say "Wow, holdup, I don't understand." There's a whole different method of communication when it comes to having an effective meeting that isn't face to face. Things like going around the table person to person and addressing each person individually, asking for confirmation of something being understood, not assum
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Are you trying to imply that they way people communicate is forever fixed in stone and cannot be changed or improved upon? Don't you think that's a little shortsighted?
Sorry, could you rephrase your questions? I didn't understand what you were asking, as I was unable to see your facial expression as you were typing them.
Wiimote (Score:2)
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Videoconferencing + whiteboard (Score:2)
Whiteboard Substitutes For Distributed Teams?
Videconferencing + whiteboard. It's a very common combination (as it is no longer uncommon to work with remote teams.)
Rocketboard (Score:2)
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I saw your video - it looks very interesting. Any idea about pricing and availability?
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Any thoughts on how to let multiple people work on the same (virtual) whiteboard with your product?
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Interesting. Do you plan to allow tiling on a single display? For example, suppose I and three coworkers are each using your system on his own real whiteboard. Do you plan to make it so a computer monitor can show those four whiteboard images on some screen at the same time?
Also, different question: do you expect to support Linux hosts that have webcams plugged in?
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Thanks for the info. I'm sure you've done your market research, but just FYI, the iPhone-only requirement is a seriously limiting factor for my team. I don't know how representative we are, but you might consider broadening the platform support asap.
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Looked at the site, can't wait to be able to try it (signed up on the site to hopefully get in the beta eventually).
We're also in Boston and starting to have remote teams/offices, but full digital whiteboards are a little too much for us. This looks like a sweet spot.
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Pretty interesting concept and if it works as well in the real world as the video portrays, it could be very cool to use. I was all ready to sign up for early access and talk about it with my team on Monday, until I saw your comment below that it only works on Apple devices.
In the tech and development world (especially in the trenches) Android rules, and our office is no exception. What a downer.
Networked Projector (Score:1)
HP Sprout (Score:3)
https://sprout.hp.com/us/en/ [hp.com] This is what you need: a touch/draw surface for you to draw on, but overlaid with a video projection of what everyone else is drawing.
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That looks pretty neat. Unfortunately that's pretty expensive by my current standards.
Google Wave? (Score:2)
Google (Score:3)
My team is spread all over the world. We've managed to do quite well using a combination of Google+ Hangouts (with their various interaction plugins) and Trello.
We use G+ for those real-time drawing and thinking sessions, and then once we get all of our thoughts organized and shared with one another, we push it out to Trello for long term storage and project management tracking.
It's people like you that cause global warming (Score:2, Offtopic)
Pen/stylus tablets? (Score:2)
I'd think using pen/stylus tablets to scribble diagrams and then emailing or messaging those amongst the team members would be about as good as you can get, unless you can find a software package that would let the people share a drawing space using individual tablets. I've long wanted to get one of the Samsung tablets just for that purpose.
This is really hard. As in "middle-east peace" har (Score:2)
I reviewed 30 offerings for my office. None pleased everyone or most. If you have just a few office locations, Smart makes great connected whiteboards. It's hard to find better. If you have work-from-home or people want to use iPads and whiteboards at the same time, or you've got paper-only constituents, it's a complete mess. Might look at Groupboard or Board thing.
OneNote (Score:2)
Have you thought about Microsoft OneNote? It is free now. All you do is everyone opens the same file over a network share. If you have touch screens or graphics tablets, you can all draw at the same time. It only takes a second or two to catch up.
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Second Life location "Bluepill" (Score:2)
This was an application of the "Coven" research done between 1995-1999 among several European school partners. Was shockingly successful, back in 2003. Don't know if it even still exists... had whiteboards, an auditorium, a poster gallery (with video walls and Powerpoint scrollers), you name it.
Citations: Steed, Tromp &al.
Time for the mega screens (Score:2)
I'm waiting for whiteboard sized touch screens to make their appearance. I know Microsoft was working on this a couple of years back.
This would not only be useful for long-distance collaboration, but for team collaboration as well. Image working on a conference table-sized monitor, with a common workspace among 7-8 people. I think a team like that could potentially be more productive than the same number working independently. May require a different sort of programmer.
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I'm waiting for whiteboard sized touch screens to make their appearance. I know Microsoft was working on this a couple of years back.
No you aren't. You're waiting for them to come down from astronomical prices. You can get them now.
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The problem may be that the mega screens are (from what I've seen) video quality, and thus crazy expensive.
Nope. The cost of the display itself pales compared next to the cost of the digitizer.
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The problem may be that the mega screens are (from what I've seen) video quality, and thus crazy expensive.
Nope. The cost of the display itself pales compared next to the cost of the digitizer.
Here is a relatively economical digitizer($600) that just connects to any tv/projector: http://store.e-beam.com/ebeam-... [e-beam.com]
Here is a $500 projector that supports a light pen: http://www.mitsubishi-presenta... [mitsubishi...ations.com] and I know there are many more.
There is also the wii remote which is dirt cheap if a little bit of DIY.
These are not near the resolution of a professional digitizer but would still easily match the resolution of the typical dry erase marker
and you can attach them to any tv that you have lying around.
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Here is a relatively economical digitizer($600) that just connects to any tv/projector: http://store.e-beam.com/ebeam- [e-beam.com]...
Requires a special pen, expensive and easy to misplace, cleaning lady hides it, etc.
Here is a $500 projector that supports a light pen: http://www.mitsubishi-presenta... [www.mitsub...resenta...]
It's too bad they give absolutely zero details about the light pen on the page. They just say it exists. Won't even show it to you. I'm guessing this is also shit.
Real multitouch digitizers which attach to a display cost a lot more than the display. You want people to be happy with crappy alternatives. If they were good, they'd already be widely adopted.
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If they were good, they'd already be widely adopted.
The reason they aren't widely adopted has nothing to do with whether they are good or bad.
The reason thay aren't widely adopted is because most people just don't need one.
Alot of schools have installed smartboards. For the most part, I've never seen them use
the digitizer and defintely not enough to justify the cost. They are mostly used to show
movies and slides which could have been done at half the cost with a regular tv.
Wacom, ArtRage, Skype (Score:2)
For multiple people sharing the same whiteboard, I recommend using WebEx which has a mediocre whiteboard, but it works better than the other's I've tried.
Vyew (Score:2)
Is what I have used. I have found it quite adequate. Hooked up a graphics tablet to my machine and I could draw like a 3year old. With practice I might get better.
BigBlueButton (Score:2)
I'm currently implementing it as part of our digital learning platform.
Not sure if it covers all the things you need, but it's a start.
Re: (Score:2)
It rains in both places, and snow, although not so much on North Shore. The rain is just a bit colder in Amsterdam, but that's a reason to stay indoors and avoid sand in "naughty bits" (as a Californian, I learned, a long time ago, some techniques for that, but they're harder to remember when "under the influence").