[bigbluebutton-dev] Whiteboard up on devbuild.bigbluebutton.org

[Denis Zgonjanin]

The whiteboard module for 0.7 is up on devbuild.bigbluebutton.org. If you have time go and try it out. There are undoubtedly bugs. Post them back here as you find them so they can be fixed.

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[Doug "SuperDuG" Smith]

I successfully drew a house, a sun, and a stick figure saying "hi".

This concludes my very scientific testing and validation.

Verdict:  Very nice work!

[Doug "SuperDuG" Smith]

Review cont'd

Okay noticing some serious lag, also the PUBLIC MESSAGE WAITING is almost as memorable and fun as the old FLASH tag in html :-/

Still, seems great for a beta IMHO!

On 05/03/2010 03:17 PM, Denis Zgonjanin wrote:

[Keith Poore]

Works, great. It would be nice to be able to adjust the pen width to a small thickness. I’m sure that will happen it time.

 

Keith

 

From: bigblueb...@googlegroups.com [mailto:bigblueb...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Doug "SuperDuG" Smith
Sent: May 3, 2010 4:58 PM
To: bigblueb...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [bigbluebutton-dev] Whiteboard up on devbuild.bigbluebutton.org

 

Review cont'd

Okay noticing some serious lag, also the PUBLIC MESSAGE WAITING is almost as memorable and fun as the old FLASH tag in html :-/

Still, seems great for a beta IMHO!

On 05/03/2010 03:17 PM, Denis Zgonjanin wrote:

The whiteboard module for 0.7 is up on devbuild.bigbluebutton.org. If you have time go and try it out. There are undoubtedly bugs. Post them back here as you find them so they can be fixed. --
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[Denis Zgonjanin]

Doug - can you explain the lag issue you're experiencing

Keith - there's a slider in the toolbar on the right which you can use to adjust the thickness

Thanks for the feedback guys

[Keith Poore]

I used the slider but I still found it too thick for hand writing.  I often write on top of slides (I use a tablet PC).

 

Keith

 

 

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[Denis Zgonjanin]

Ok. We can make it thinner

[SuperDuG]

Seems to be related to when there are a lot of things that have been
drawn that haven't shown up on my screen yet. I always noticed right
after the BBB froze (chat, presentation, everything) that there would
be a fair amount of drawing showing up on the screen when everything
normalized. I don't think the constant changing of the title endless
loop helped matters either.

[Denis Zgonjanin]

That makes sense. If you draw one big freehand shape (draw for a long time without releasing) then a lot of stuff needs to be sent to the server. And then the shape needs to be sent to all the other clients, which could be a pretty big load on the server.

I'll try to do some optimization of the freehand pencil shapes - they're the only ones causing trouble.

[jer...@welforum.com]

Great job on the whiteboard.  It works very well with cursive script on a graphics tablet - the best I've seen!  The script is not solid however, any chance of the lines joining the dots being a bit denser?  I guess that you'll add object fills later.  Right now a very useful tool and dead simple to master.

Thanks

Jeremy Peckham

[Denis Zgonjanin]

The dots do add as lines, it's just that there's an alpha added to the shape, so that as you're drawing over the slides it works as a sort of a highlighter. Try the black color - it has alpha disabled, you should see a solid line. When there's alpha some parts of the line overlap so it appears as if the line is denser in some areas than others. I'm still trying to figure out how to make the alpha uniform across the whole line.

[sawangpong]

Hi Denis
Please guild me how to compile whiteboard module? Which doc i should
read.
Thank you

[Denis Zgonjanin]

The whiteboard is in trunk, so you just need to check out the latest source code for bbb-client and bbb-apps and rebuild

[Denis Zgonjanin]

Thank you everyone who gave feedback, it was really useful.

I've just checked in an updated whiteboard. Some improvements:

- It is now possible to make the lines very thin. 1 pixel wide is the new minimum, for those who are using tablets

- The shapes no longer seem thick in some parts and faded in others, they are uniform throughout

- New and better looking icons, thanks to Tyler Copeland

- red5 no longer gets flooded by a large calls after a user draws a really long shape. The shape is split into smaller chunks as it's being drawn

- shapes are optimized on the server before being sent back to the clients, reducing bandwidth

- freehand drawings are smoothed out somewhat to create a better appearance. this is a side-effect of the above optimization

- the whiteboard can now support a lot more shapes per page before Flash Player starts lagging.

- Shapes are remembered across different presentations. This means if you upload more that one presentation and draw on each, when you switch back and forms the drawings will still be there.

- Black is solid. All other colors are slightly transparent so that they can be used as a highlighter.

What didn't make it in:

- Blank pages. This needs more work than anticipated in order to be done The Right Way™. So we decided to do it for 0.8 (or the next minor release, whichever comes first).

- There is a small bug which also needs to be fixed on the presentation module, which is affecting the whiteboard when pages are zoomed and then switched.

Please test it once devbuild.bigbluebutton.org is up again (after the meeting token changes have been applied to the demos). This is probably the whiteboard version that will make it into 0.7, and no further changes are likely to be made to it by me, unless critical bugs are found.

Thanks,

- Denis

[Carlos A. Pedreros Lizama]

the dev version had a bug...



Error: getJoinURL() failed

checksumError: You did not pass the checksum security check

These demos use the BigBlueButton API. The source code for these demos is available here.

2010/5/12 Denis Zgonjanin <deniszg...@gmail.com>

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[Denis Zgonjanin]

Yes, devbuild is down. You have to wait until the demo pages are updated to remove meeting token (different issue)

[Carlos A. Pedreros Lizama]

oh, my bad... thanx for the info, i didn't read the last part of the post...

2010/5/12 Denis Zgonjanin <deniszg...@gmail.com>

[Jeremy Thomerson]

I think I found a couple bugs (playing with it on devbuild):

1. clicking undo after drawing on the board takes about a dozen clicks to actually undo.  I think this is related to how long you move the mouse around before clicking undo.  In other words, if I draw a shape, then move the cursor straight to undo, I may only have to click two or three times.  But, if I draw a shape, then move the cursor around for twenty seconds, then click undo, I have to click a dozen times.
2. if you choose a slide from the slide selector (click the 2/5 icon, then select one), the whiteboard controls go away

Jeremy Thomerson

[Denis Zgonjanin]

Confirmed, thanks for testing. 1. in particular seems to be a major issue

[Jeremy Thomerson]

Thanks for jumping on it!

Also, will there be any way to annotate text over the presentation?

Jeremy

[Denis Zgonjanin]

No, not for this version anyway. I think you're the first to request this actually. You could file an issue for it. From what I've seen of others using whiteboards & drawing tools, not a lot of people use the text tool - though this could be that the text tools are usually somewhat hard to use and cumbersome

[s.muegge]

Yes, great job Denis! The whiteboard is surprisingly functional for a
developer alpha, and is already well on it's way to becoming something I
could use in my classes.

Here are a few more thoughts from a heavy BigBlueButton user.

High on my "nice to have" list is the capability to enter text using the
keyboard. If done right, it could be a quick and convenient way to
annotate a sketch with some brief notes (e.g. label an axis, add a
title, put some words on an arrow, etc.). One challenge will be to keep
the UI simple.

Glad to hear that Jeremy has had success with cursive script and a
graphics tablet. Sounds promising -- I'll plan to pick up a tablet and
try it out with BigBlueButton. Nonetheless, seems to me that a keyboard
alternative would still be very useful at times.

Second would be the capability to save whiteboard doodles locally,
probably as PDF, although editable ODG, ODP, or ODF would be truly
great. The use case would be collaborating with participants on a
sketch, then providing everyone with a copy afterwards. "Print Scrn" is
ok, but a more elegant and functional solution would be preferred.

Third would be the capability to easily insert or switch to a blank page
during a presentation. This would be especially useful for an
instructor dealing with an unexpected question mid-way through a class.
(I know that this has already been proposed and deferred to 0.8, which
is understandable, but I'll still add my thoughts to the conversation)

I'd be very interested in hearing from the community whether these
features would be useful to others, or if they risk becoming the first
steps towards feature creep.

Thanks again to the BigBlueButton team for great work!
Steve

> <http://devbuild.bigbluebutton.org> is up again (after the meeting token

> changes have been applied to the demos). This is probably the whiteboard
> version that will make it into 0.7, and no further changes are likely to
> be made to it by me, unless critical bugs are found.
>
> Thanks,
> - Denis
>
> On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Denis Zgonjanin
> <deniszg...@gmail.com <mailto:deniszg...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> The whiteboard is in trunk, so you just need to check out the latest
> source code for bbb-client and bbb-apps and rebuild
>
>
> On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 12:33 AM, sawangpong <sawan...@gmail.com
> <mailto:sawan...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Hi Denis
> Please guild me how to compile whiteboard module? Which doc i
> should
> read.
> Thank you
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the
> Google Groups "BigBlueButton-dev" group.
> To post to this group, send email to
> bigblueb...@googlegroups.com

> <mailto:bigblueb...@googlegroups.com>.

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[Denis Zgonjanin]

Thanks for the feedback,

- The ability to add text would be nice, but I haven't come across any software that did it in a simple and intuitive way. It always seems to involve too much clicking around, then dragging, repositioning, changing font size, and almost never is the person putting the text there happy with it on the first try. Another concern of mine with the text feature is that it just opens the door to the presenter typing too much over the slides, making the slides busy and messy. This is more on the quality of the presenters presentation side of concerns. There are already text/pictures on the slides, and I think the ability to add more text to those slides won't enhance the user experience.

- While it's possible to convert the whiteboard drawings to pdf locally and have the presenter save them on his computer, the libraries needed to do this would increase the size of the client significantly. Keeping the client small is important both for low bandwidth users as well as because each second longer the user has to wait for the client to load takes away from the experience. More importantly, it wouldn't be possible to also save the underlying slide with the whiteboard, so you would be getting a pdf with the whiteboard shapes but without the slide that goes along with them. I think the better option here would be to have the whiteboard imposed on top of the slides on the server side, and then re-saved to the presentation pdf which could be shared. I'm not 100% sure this is possible, but I have some hope.

- The blank page also I would like to see have the above functionality to be saved to the presentation pdf on the server, in the right index between slides where it was originally created. This is part of the reason the blank page functionality hasn't been implemented for this release, the changes to the presentation module were too big to handle right now.

Thanks,

- Denis