I've contributed some lines of code to this project, and thought it might be interesting to some that the library powering the UI is also written by the OP. It's a clever experiment that uses JSX but instead of VDOM diffing it embeds observables directly into the DOM.
So it’s a flowchart wall? As the earlier user shared, I can’t seem to get the wall to do anything either. Sticky notes can’t be dragged and the text on the site gets cut off at the site’s edges. I’m on iphone.
Can you comment quickly on what state it's in? What features does it support? What does it offer that you wouldn't get with Miro or Mural? What are some features you might miss from those? Are you still actively developing it? What should we expect from it in the next year? Are you looking for collaborators?
For instance, something I quickly noticed is that there is no freehand drawing, arrows, or connection-building tools currently. Are those coming?
This is great, congrats for shipping. It also reminds me a bit of Padlet in that there is no freehand drawing and the focus is more around connections between objects. Maybe it would be better to describe it as a corkboard or pinboard.
I do have some layout issues in Chrome, y is overflowing so I get two y-scrollbars.
Congrats for reaching this state. I really like the clean and simple interface.
What I am missing are a few more sentences about hosting. I saw the documentation about the variables and the commands to host a dev environment, but which commands should I use to run it in production?
It's read-only, but you can select all (Cmd-A), create a new board and paste the contents on a new board of yours on the Ourboard front page.
I now realize that a Fork Board feature might be useful.
Also having second thoughts on whether it's a good idea to have a "default board" that's read-write for anonymous users. Some political content observed on that one today.
At some point I have to wonder if it is actual racists or HN users poking holes into moderation, security, etc. This seems a bit too niche to be the target of random actual racists.
That's a good point. It's definitely not a drawing tool. More of an electronic version of post-it notes and images on a whiteboard. You can "draw" diagrams using shapes and arrows and text, but not freeform. I personally haven't missed freeform drawing.
I like Excalidraw too, but in my opinion OurBoard has a different focus.
- Excalidraw is superb if you want to draw something freestyle.
- Ourboard seems to focus more on creating boxes (notes) which you can group and connect. If I understand it correctly, you can even load Github issues into your board.
At the start of the pandemic, I searched for Whiteboards where I could draw things freestyle (installed MS Whiteboard), but over time I noticed, that I used MS Powerpoint most of the time, because it was so much better at handling boxes in collaborative environments. I think OurBoard could be even better at this job.
Miro has an interesting learning curve (at least for me). I absolutely hated it for the first couple dozen times I used it.
Then, there was one meeting where it was particularly effective in running a “sticky note” exercise and my opinion on it flipped that day from around -7 to +3 [on a -10 to +10 scale]. It’s grown slightly on me since then as well; I might be a +5 on it right now.
The hover text for "note" and "area" both say "drag to add a new text note". Then the one for "text" says "drag to add a new text area". I'm not sure if that's on purpose, but it's confusing. Though all three function in a way that's consistent with their respective icon.
Also, on the "area" widget, there's a popup when I click on it, with a background color picker and font size choice. But there's also an icon with 4 squares arranged 2x2. It's not clear what that does.
Looks cool! Like the super plain appearance and simplicity. Would suit to screencasts and quick diagrams, while OurBoard is more of a collaboration tool, I’d say.
Thanks! The goal is simplicity, so it doesn't attempt feature parity with a more comprehensive tool like yours. Collaboration features, along with any features that can't be implemented on simple static hosting, are out of scope.
I really like the collaborative nature of what you've built. I can definitely imagine using this in meetings or group planning sessions.
Once I went to a board, I could back to the board selection screen, but no further, including back to HN. It just doesn't go - no errors in the console, but never goes back further. Are you doing something with the browser's history?
I'm mildly surprised that the view rectangle in the "mini-map" in the bottom right is not draggable with the usual semantics of panning the view. Or at least if it's supposed to work that way, it doesn't in my browser.
Heroku killed the app but it was fortunately span back up quickly. Apparently 512MB memory on a single Heroku dyno is not Hacker News scale. The application does have a horizontally scalable architecture for sharding boards on multiple hosts, it's not just fully deployed as there has mostly been just 1-2 boards in use at any given time.
Harmaja (https://github.com/raimohanska/harmaja)