I can't switch to this yet, but I would if ...#30
This is great, saw it blow up on HN, exciting time for you guys, love your enthusiasm keep building!!
Let me talk you through my use case and what needs to adapt for me to switch over:
I tutor math online. THE PEN TOOL DOESN’T ACCEPT STYLUS INPUT X( lol, yeah. Nor can you box-select drawings to delete. Check out the functionality of the 3 top web whiteboards: Ziteboard, BitPaper, and AwwApp. Replicate BitPaper’s “snap-to-line drawing” feature. Single biggest improvement of digital over physical drawing
Like I commented elsewhere, yYworks “yEd Live” is the feature-set to be inspired from in terms of ability to auto-arrange cards (just find some basic graph-layout hiearchical tree-sort algorithms, and also force-field algorithms like https://jheer.github.io/barnes-hut/ ). This is mindblowingly useful, because you can just plop down the connectivity of differerent people, tasks, or ideas … and then simply due to the connectivity, it re-arranges it to show you the underlying structure (e.g. implicit task prioritization, by writing the tasks, tying them together in order, then IT sorts them by location for you). But to do this you’d need to implement directed-connections (again, make ‘→’ a toggle, the default ‘⇔’ arrows are more appropriate for basic users).
The .pdf embed is awesome!
Using Ryeborad could potentially solve a really annoying problem on laptops: too-small viewports, reading from multiple .pdf documents can’t be resized, so you only want to see a 400x200px window, but it’s all-or-nothing.
When tutoring I embed the ‘questions paper’ I’d be tutoring from, rather than needing to copy-paste screenshot snippets. However, when embedding A4 pages on a 13” laptop, to get the page big enough to be legible, the control buttons go off-page. Simplest solution: add an option to move the control buttons to the TOP of the card (so I can have the document top-centered, but still be able to navigate in it without needing to go to its bottom). Ideally also implement .pdf scrolling and zooming (though yes that’s an order of magnitude harder to do). The benefit of this is, when I have formula booklets (technical manuals) to reference from, I just zoom into that specific part and has that as an adjacent stand-alone card.
I can easily see myself having a catalogue of formula-sheet cards stored, that I can just pull-up at a moment’s notice
Love the ability to share checklist cards, I can forsee making a modular TeamGantt style compettitor with this. However, when I shared one with no text, it worked fine, but sharing one with text then broke
Copy and compete with the main features of Reveal.Js:
Make a free account at slides.com , and use that as your starting point. I use it for teaching but it’s not quite suitable (because it requires you to split everything into neat little slides, and has no pen input). I envision Ryeboard as an alternative to Prezi — I would use RyeBoard for my presentations, scrolling around the different content on one big page, zooming-in where appropriate. It would be great because, since it’s one big map, ‘location’=’stage in the presentation’, so you would never get lost
However the biggest feature of Reveal.Js that Ryeboard lacks (beyond neat math formatting, markdown support, and ability to IMPORT A MARKDOWN DOCUMENT INTO A SEQUENCE OF TILES) is: ability to embed web-pages.
It’s web-native, so should be possible. Right now the web-page link is pretty useless (it’s just a glorified link preview), and would make users bounce to other sites.
Instead, make it possible to embed ~things~. 1. Youtube videos, 2. Desmos calculator applets, 3. GeoGebra calculator applets. (again, see how easy slides.com makes this) If you want it to be rich, interactive media … you need some interactive elements!
I’ll say it again, ability to allow power-users to mass-import a string of different Markdown formatted cards would be heaven. And then, link them together, auto-arrange the layout to look neat, and hey presto, you’ve replaced Prezi. I’m not kidding, currently you’re using this as a collaborative workspace, but it could very easily ALSO out-compete slideshow presentation software (because scrolling down one single document is actually neater and more granular than being forced to artificially chunk things into different ‘slides’). So keep that in mind as another target market. Enable .ppt , keynote, and google slides import (not even editable, just rendering them) to make it easier for people to switch … ?
Embedding Google forms, mailchimp, Acuity Scheduling, and MentiMeeter (online polling software) would also be sick
Keep at it!
I like you guys so I’ll share a final secret: (will be back in a few months):
web-scrape and auto-block email domains originating from https://temp-mail.org/ cuz otherwise savvy users won’t pony-up their real emails ;)
(Somehow ProtonMail and Twitter manage to block all temp-mail addresses, and its really annoying for me, but it really works)
This is some awesome feedback Polarisme! Thanks for taking the time to write this out. To address your comments one by one:
- Stylus input is essential (along with mobile support). We will roll this out ASAP!
- Drawings as well as connectors should be selectable - we will get on this ASAP as well haha.
- Auto-arranging cards is something we always wanted to play around with. The “view” feature we have right now on boards is supposed to be a rough version of this but I will tkae a look at yYworks that you referred!
- PDF is indeed riddled with a few annoying bugs atm. We will be addressing this shortly.
- Importing markdown to note-cards is also on our list!
- Youtube videos are embeddable atm but perhaps we should open more possibilities with wider iframe support…
- Haha services like temp-mail do hamper our email marketing a bit but we don’t want to force users who value their privacy to give their emails to us.
Thanks again for writing this all out Polarisme! Let me know if you have any further feedback.
+1 for yEd-like features, I use it for mind mapping but an all-in-one product is always preferred