add a collaborative "whiteboard"

[haraldschilly]

this ticket is about adding a new editor for a collaborative whiteboard. the main goal is to take notes with a digital pen to draw (free hand, shapes, etc.) and later share this. Regarding the whiteboard, a similar app is https://miro.com or Google's Jamboard

Requested by: Dmitrij Moreinis

[dimpase]

+1

[dimpase]

preferably with a capacity to type in TeX, too

[williamstein]

There are some open sourced projects from like 5 years ago that do this, which may be useful for reference and inspiration:

• https://github.com/lovasoa/whitebophir
• https://github.com/spacedeck/spacedeck-open

@dimpase I appreciate Dima pointing out that what we do for CoCalc should maximally leverage our unique strengths. For example, we should support latex, markdown, embedding computations (using a Jupyter kernel), chat.

@haraldschilly

the main goal is to take notes with a digital pen to draw (free hand, shapes, etc.) and later share this.

It would be very, very helpful to clarify the main goals. Why do the above? What motivated you to make this issue. My random ideas:

• brainstorming ideas, e.g., for research or development and sketching out architecture of systems
• slides for a classroom style presentation
• an online way to draw and edit svg's (probably way too hard since we would want to parse svg).
• a way to grade student solutions (by attaching little sketches with a pen to particular points in any document).
• a non-linear UI for interacting with Jupyter kernels (like MathCad)

Harald you wrote "main goal is to take notes", so are you imagining somebody in a lecture taking notes inside a cocalc project? Why would they do that, rather than using the myriad of vastly superior note-taking applications? E.g., on an ipad there is "$5 app" that also records the audio of the lecture and syncs it with the notes you draw on the screen, organizing everything, etc., (and it was really mature already 5 years ago). How do we compete with that?

[williamstein]

REQUESTED BY: Oliver Pechenik

"The main thing we've been missing in CoCalc is that the chat rooms don't have a shared whiteboard feature. There are some other video conferencing systems that have this and it is quite useful for math because everyone can sketch diagrams collaboratively. We've had to open separate software when we needed to do this, but it would be great to have it all under one CoCalc roof."

[dimpase]

I have been playing a bit with https://idroo.com/

…

On Sat, 18 Apr 2020, 00:22 William Stein, ***@***.***> wrote: REQUESTED BY: Oliver Pechenik "The main thing we've been missing in CoCalc is that the chat rooms don't have a shared whiteboard feature. There are some other video conferencing systems that have this and it is quite useful for math because everyone can sketch diagrams collaboratively. We've had to open separate software when we needed to do this, but it would be great to have it all under one CoCalc roof." — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#4283 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAJXYHCPXWHBUJECYFTP5ODRNB66DANCNFSM4J22ZAJA> .

[slel]

Possibly related:

• jupyterlab-drawio: a diagram editor for JupyterLab
  https://blog.jupyter.org/a-diagram-editor-for-jupyterlab-a254121ff919

[mforbes]

What I would love is a whiteboard for teaching: I would like to be able to deliver online lectures via Jitsi (or Zoom), working down a column as if it were an infinitely tall chalkboard, while allowing students to work off to the side, asking questions, doing calculations, etc. I tried spacedeck-open but it did not seem to support interactive editing. Inserting other content would be great, but just a place to draw would be fantastic.

Many of the open-source web-based platforms don't work with my surface (pen input becomes a bunch of dots wherever the pen hits the screen, not lines). The commercial versions seem to work.

[khoffLSU]

I would like to see sketching capabilities integrated as a different cell type inside of Jupyter notebooks. I believe this would augment the existing Jupyter ecosystem in a positive way. Instead of a markdown cell, you could incorporate a sketching cell that integrated with apple pens or alternative bluetooth stylus types, or had standard mouse based drawing tools. It seems to me that the CoCalc interface with its collaboration capabilities, time machine concept, and other advantages would provide a really nice place for this type of integration. I could see this displacing the basic paper notebook almost entirely since you could take hand notes, write type font, and conduct computations all within one environment. In classrooms, teachers could easily interact with what a student was doing real time inside or outside of a class room setting. It the work place, teams could collaborate actively on a solution, or a mentor could work with a men-tee on a notebook through training and on boarding. I haven't done any research on the availability of this today. There seem to be a thread or two out there about it, but nothing easily accessible.

[mforbes]

Just thinking "aloud": Would it be possible to have an annotation system that works on top of all types of documents displayed on CoCalc? I.e. a way to annotate PDF files, Notebooks, etc.? I would imagine that the annotations would be stored similarly to .chat files. A problem would be that if the file changes, then the annotations would get out of sync. One possibility is that a snapshot of the content under the annotation region could be stored - if this "visually" matches the original document, then the annotation can be overplayed with confidence. If not, then the annotation could be stored as a historical artifact or previous version. (On second thought, this might be difficult since the visual representation is probably browser dependent... would be very nice though to have a universal annotation system!)

[slel]

About annotation see also #649, #2187, #4278.

[slel]

OpenBoard: http://www.openboard.ch/index.en.html

[williamstein]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24676125

[slel]

Tableaunoir: https://github.com/tableaunoir/tableaunoir

[slel]

To add to this discussion about chalkboard / drawing board / whiteboard / blackboard tools...

Just saw mentioned at https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/30537#comment:32

tableaunoirxcas -- a blackboard for online teaching
where you can insert Xcas, MicroPython or Javascript magnets

• home:
  https://www-fourier.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/~parisse/tableaunoirxcas/index.html
• example:
  https://www-fourier.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/~parisse/tableaunoirxcas/#mat309/myblackboard.tableaunoir

[williamstein]

Related JupyterLab issue: jupyterlab/jupyterlab#9194

[williamstein]

This is now merged into master and will be live in production soon: #5674

It's still definitely beta: expect some bugs and UI issues, which will get addressed as reported. I also have a very long todo list still, but nothing listed as absolute blocker. I think this is now at least "useful" and well worth it for people to try out.