[HN Gopher] Why is Excalidraw so good?
___________________________________________________________________
Why is Excalidraw so good?
Author : zekenie
Score : 637 points
Date : 2021-11-04 17:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (offbyone.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (offbyone.us)
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| 135 base physical attack.
|
| Being able to run an Adamant nature and still outspeeding most of
| the meta due to Sand Rush.
|
| Half decent bulk with amazing defensive typing.
|
| Multiple viable sets; you don't know if you're coming up against
| a defensive spinner or a juggernaut that can get to +2/+2 in one
| turn with Swords Dance.
|
| Stab EQ with decent coverage.
|
| "Good" is an understatement and a half.
| Starlevel001 wrote:
| Yet he still dropped to UU this gen. Not that good!
| jen729w wrote:
| Is this a really weird HN cross-post error?
| nightcracker wrote:
| No, it is a Pokemon reference to the very similarly named
| Excadrill.
| vjeux wrote:
| Fwiw, Ken Wheeler suggested the name excalibur but when
| looking for the domain it was already taken but
| excalibur.draw was suggested. I ended up bringing the two
| together leading to excalidraw, which was available
| everywhere.
| jen729w wrote:
| Ha! Thanks.
| franzwong wrote:
| It is handy when I have lots of remote meeting since the
| pandemic. But I always need to convert it back to Gliffy for
| Confluence.
| vbg wrote:
| This is everything.
|
| Everything:
|
| " You're in #
|
| There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No
| OAuth. You're just in the product. Are there any flashy overlay
| tours with annoying animations and pulsing buttons? Is there a
| modal upselling you on a paid plan[1]? No. You're just in
| product, able to use it."
|
| Get rid of your fancy growth marketing people, your advisors with
| their "request a demo".
|
| Get rid of your intro page talking features.
|
| Dump your stupid signup before starting.
|
| Just. Fucking. Let. People. Instantly. Use. Your. Full. Product.
|
| Instantly. Not after they give their email. Not after they click
| three dialogs. Not after they jump through whatever remaining
| hoops you'd really really love them to jump through before.
|
| Show them, indeed GIVE them your product without the slightest
| fucking delay.
|
| All of it. Stop arguing about why you'd really love to make them
| do something else before using your product. Make your marketing
| person stop insisting the marketing thing gets done first.
|
| Get people into your actual full product within the shortest
| possible time. Milliseconds if possible.
| sporedro wrote:
| I feel like this is the benefit of a web app, you can just
| simply open it without having to go through download process
| etc. Just being able to open a link and get started or try it
| out is the best part.
| fredsted wrote:
| This was an important design goal for Webhook.site, which I'm
| the founder of. You're instantly in the app, you get the unique
| URL and you're ready to do. No need to click anywhere. By now
| I've lost count of how many people have written to me saying
| they appreciate this aspect of the product.
| dahart wrote:
| I thought so too, so I actually tried this. With a whiteboard
| app. And it didn't exactly work, new users and engagement went
| down compared to having a "landing page" in front.
|
| Only a relatively few people like you and me really want to
| dive in without having a story first. Turns out, to my surprise
| (!) that most people don't want to dive into your app without
| reading about it or watching a video first.
|
| Teachers, kids, business users, they all have different
| questions they want answered _before_ they spend time trying to
| learn a new app, they want to know if there are reasons this
| can or can't be the thing they use from now on. Learning a UI
| is a time investment, and people want to make sure it will be a
| good investment before using their time. They don't want to be
| tricked into learning your UI for a week or two or more and
| then find out later it can't group and copy-paste shapes, or
| that the price goes up, or that they can't share they way they
| need, or that your app doesn't have a on-premise installation.
|
| Getting in quickly can have a low barrier to entry, I'm with
| you there, but my experience on the other side of this is that
| it's not good to go directly to the app without an intro first,
| generally speaking.
|
| Aside from this there's also the fact that users who don't
| intend to pay are on average way more demanding, way less
| patient, and way less understanding about communicating and
| learning the UI and dealing with bugs or misunderstandings. It
| was surprising for me to see from the other side how rude the
| free users are on average compared to the paying users.
| amelius wrote:
| Then build a second website which acts as a landing page for
| the thing you've built.
|
| Or create a youtube channel for it.
|
| No need to spoil the tool for everybody with marketing cruft.
| Lutger wrote:
| > It was surprising for me to see from the other side how
| rude the free users are on average compared to the paying
| users.
|
| In my experience, this also applies to cheap vs expensive
| projects (consultancy). Customers start to get really
| pleasant and polite when they are charged at least 100K or
| something like that for doing some custom software
| development. They get very demanding when it's below 10K.
| snek_case wrote:
| Might be because you're talking to different sets of
| customers. People who are cheap vs people who know what
| they want is complex and are willing to pay for it.
| tie_ wrote:
| > Just. Fucking. Let. People. Instantly. Use. Your. Full.
| Product.
|
| I love that - and that's how I aim to build things now.
|
| Excalidraw has few calls to external domains as well - just
| Google Analytics and Sentry.io. That's still two that can be
| reduced, but it's much better than most modern clustertrucks.
| vjeux wrote:
| Yeah, we've been trying to keep it without calling to any
| external service. Both of them are optional, excalidraw will
| work offline and/or with an adblocker that blocks those
| domains.
|
| That said, those two have been really important for the
| success of the project. Google Analytics is helpful to get a
| sense of how important it is to people and motivation for the
| team. The second one helped us fix a lot of edge cases that
| couldn't immediately be found via normal testing.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| I agree as a user. As a developer and businessperson though
| this sounds incredibly entitled - "make great software and give
| it to me instantly for free. I should get to keep using it and
| you should get nothing."
|
| Shouldn't it be win/win? Both sides giving something to help
| each other? Software gets tricky I guess since it's fun to
| develop, and mere attention or praise is enough for many devs.
| And ads blur the line of "free". But the level of childish
| entitlement gets a little depressing sometimes.
| Joeri wrote:
| You need customers before you can make money. It makes sense
| to me that you first create a user base before you try to
| upsell them. If the goal is to create a user base, the fewer
| hurdles the better.
|
| I don't see it as having to do with entitlement, more as a
| case of it being easier to standout in a crowd of options
| when your thing is easier to start with.
| swayvil wrote:
| You are contributing to the good health of your society.
| Benefit is enjoyed by all members.
|
| You are also advancing the art. Which is an objective good.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| You could say that about doing free plumbing, free
| dentistry, etc.
| swayvil wrote:
| Yes you could. In the first case anyway.
| audunw wrote:
| Two issues with that
|
| - Does it actually lead to higher sales? If not, nobody is
| going to care about our wish for more companies to do this.
|
| - It doesn't work for many products. How do you just drop
| someone into a cloud storage product? You could give them some
| temporary space where they can drop some files if they want,
| but what do you do if they abandon them? Delete them after some
| time? Might confuse some customers who didn't realize they had
| to actually register an account. Maybe a huge banner with a
| countdown would work... you start to have to solve a whole lot
| of problems to make it work
| II2II wrote:
| There are many categories to consider here. Three examples:
|
| - Products that don't require any of this stuff.
|
| - Products that require some form of registration since it
| stores user data remotely. The person registers so they may
| secure, modify, or remove that data. The handling of personal
| data should serve this role exclusively.
|
| - Products that require some form of initial setup and
| onboarding will facilitate that setup for the vast majority
| of people. The user should still be able to bypass the
| onboarding in case their use case doesn't reflect the common
| use case.
|
| When marketing becomes involved, things become problematic.
| That friendly offer of assistance to get started usually
| reflects marketable features rather than any form of genuine
| training. That collection of personal information is used to
| harass the person using the product rather than to facilitate
| the use of the product. (Heck, I have companies contacting me
| over a decade after I last used their product to try to make
| a sale.)
| exikyut wrote:
| > _Does it actually lead to higher sales? If not, nobody is
| going to care about our wish for more companies to do this._
|
| I think this is a really, _really_ interesting phenomena: the
| human brain (perhaps when sufficiently institutionalized)
| exhibits some sort of fundamental bias toward disruptive UX
| that breaks flow and productivity, and this approach must be
| proven wrong, every time, on a case by case basis, and doesn
| 't fundamentally internalize.
|
| It's crazy: because it doesn't lead to higher sales, it's
| seen as a bad approach. WHY? "Just because."
| stnmtn wrote:
| > It's crazy: because it doesn't lead to higher sales, it's
| seen as a bad approach. WHY? "Just because."
|
| If the goal of a company is to create higher sales, then it
| is a bad approach.
|
| If the goal is to create a great tool used by people and
| not worry about adoption or supporting a large business
| through profit, it's probably a great idea!
| vbg wrote:
| But so many products that are well suited to immediate usage
| are hidden behind layers of explanation and marketing and
| signup and other irrelevant barriers.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| They might be irrelevant to you as a user, but are they
| irrelevant to the bottom line of the organizations behind
| the products?
| edynoid wrote:
| And that, comrades, is yet another way to realize our
| economy's incentive system is misaligned with people's
| material needs.
| robocat wrote:
| Says the person with free time to write, freedom to
| express an opinion, food in their belly, shelter, hot
| water, a computer in their pocket, access to a free
| vaccine, yada yada yada.
| tootie wrote:
| That's how the newspaper business approached the internet and
| it nearly killed them all. You can't do this in a competitive
| field where operating your platform is expensive. Excalidraw is
| probably run by a few people not trying to get rich and able to
| iterate on code at their own pace. That is an ideal situation
| to keep it simple. It just doesn't work for most businesses.
| vbg wrote:
| I was thinking this is a universal approach for all
| businesses but I see now it's not.
| [deleted]
| jameshart wrote:
| This is great advice if your goal is to get the maximal number
| of people using your product.
|
| But it's not exactly clear how you plan to turn that into, say,
| revenue. Build it and they will come, sure. And the more leads
| you stuff into the top of the conversion funnel, the more
| conversions, right? What do you mean 'qualified' leads?
|
| If your product's viability will rest on turning some
| percentage of those free users into subscribers or purchasers,
| then you have to do _some_ upsell, at _some_ point. And if they
| can get into the full product without any obstacles within
| milliseconds, you 're going to have a very, very hard job
| getting those conversions. Meanwhile you're winning over free
| users who cost you money and time to serve in handling their
| support and feature requests, and you're bringing in ever more
| people who are never going to give you any money.
|
| It _is_ viable to build your product this way if the primary
| product your business sells is 'convincing investors that by
| building up loyal active users, and developing rich
| understanding of those users' behavior, you will somehow create
| a reservoir of value that can be sold for 10x the amount of
| money you're asking them to put in to keep your servers turned
| on for another few months'
|
| And it's probably viable if you aren't trying to be a business
| at all.
|
| But as generic 'this is how all products should work' advice,
| it's pretty terrible, unless your main advice is 'don't try to
| make a business around offering a software product unless
| you're primarily interested in selling engagement monetization
| fairytales to investors'.
| vbg wrote:
| You monetize when the user has value that they do not want to
| let go.
|
| Ready to save your new work of art?
|
| Or higher resolution?
|
| Or premium features?
|
| You do it when the user is hooked.
|
| I was not advocating for "no revenue".
|
| Also it seems self evident that such advice does not apply to
| all software.... Do you think I'm saying this is how SAP
| should be sold? No..., obviously the advice applies to
| software suited to this approach.
| jameshart wrote:
| 'Here's the whole product with no tutorial or marketing
| crap, off you go, have fun'
|
| 'Thanks! Oh wow, this is great!'
|
| 'Glad you like it.'
|
| 'I love how you don't try to upsell me on things or push
| any kind of premium paid features, just give me the whole
| product without limitations'
|
| 'Yeah, that's our philosophy, let you fall in love with the
| product'
|
| 'Cool, thanks. Okay, I'm gonna save my work now.'
|
| '$20, please'
|
| 'I'm sorry what?'
|
| '$20 to save.'
|
| 'Er... could you have mentioned this earlier? I just spent
| ages using your awesome product and you just let me in and
| I didn't have to sign up or anything, and you never
| mentioned a premium upsell, so I just assumed...'
|
| 'Yeah, I thought I might be able to trick you like that. We
| call it "bait and switch". Isn't it so much better than all
| that marketing BS?'
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| I agree, not allowing to save would be pretty asinine.
| But having collaboration or limiting the number of
| documents or the complexity of documents is totally
| acceptable.
| zekenie wrote:
| It's not advice for _all_ new products. Excalidraw has a plus
| plan, and I'd be curious to learn if they're seeing success.
| I think if you make something highly highly accessible and
| lovable, there will be opportunities to make money. Not sure!
| It's just a core belief of mine. I'm also sure there are
| products like that that can never figure out the pivot to $.
| vjeux wrote:
| The plus plan has been very successful from my point of
| view, we've been able to bootstrap the business and make
| our first hire.
|
| The key realization is that while the unauthenticated open
| source model works really well for individuals, it's hard
| for companies to adopt.
|
| They want authentication, security policies, private spaces
| to collaborate, access control, search... all of this
| requires having a company behind it in practice and the
| open source model doesn't work as well.
|
| The two versions so far work really well alongside each
| other right now.
| sfg wrote:
| Impressive.
|
| How did you get people to try the free version? What
| worked?
| intrasight wrote:
| There is an upsell to Excalidraw+, and it's the first thing I
| clicked on. $7/month.
| ubercore wrote:
| This feels like rediscovering balsamiq, which made a splash about
| 12 years ago.
| kensai wrote:
| I thought of the same. But if this is free and with a vibrant
| community of libraries, it could make an even bigger splash!
| kazinator wrote:
| > _There 's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No
| OAuth. You're just in the product._
|
| You mean like pretty much every single darned productivity
| program before year 200X?
|
| It's sad that this even has to be an issue.
| jamil7 wrote:
| No annoying drip emails "checking in" every few days.
| jesterson wrote:
| "Hey, I know you are super busy but I just wanted to
| check..."
|
| Makes me want to ditch the product on the spot. Yes, I've
| seen your emails. Yes, I will let you know if I need
| anything. No, I don't need a zoom call/onboarding
| video/introductory convo with your marketing team.
| ballenf wrote:
| Ditching the product is probably the goal of the email, if
| the stats show that paid adoption happens within x days 98%
| of the time.
|
| What I think those stats miss is that I will test a product
| with one email and if I decide to buy for a team will use a
| new account. So it looks like the conversion happened
| immediately skewing their sales/marketing strategy.
| sytelus wrote:
| Yes, but they also don't have to run series rounds, forced to
| grow 50% YoY, exit in 5 years and retire before they turn 30.
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| Google and Co really dragged this industry into the mudpit.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| You mean that the companies making insane margins and paying
| top compensation are exactly the ones responsible for most of
| this this since they're massively profiting from monetizing
| consumers through various dark patterns, ads and spying?
|
| Shocking! Who would have thought? /s
| watersb wrote:
| You can hurt yourself if you run with scissors.
| watersb wrote:
| The first "onboarding" I can remember, from Microsoft Word
| 6.0 in (?) 1993.
|
| It would display a dialog when you opened the program. Every.
| Damn. Time. Displayed a useful tip from the included
| documentation.
|
| At the time, it felt like a huge, complicated, OLE
| application, a big departure from the previous version, Word
| 5.1.
|
| I suspected that some members of the Word 6 product team felt
| the same about that startup dialog: at a loss to suggest
| anything productive for that "Useful product tip for today",
| they wrote down some inane safety tips.
|
| "Welcome to Microsoft Word... You can hurt yourself if you
| run with scissors."
| Ettaa wrote:
| Exactly, like good ol' times
| gilbetron wrote:
| I agree with the annoyance of so many modern tools and all the
| crap to use them, and appreciate ExcaliDraw for not doing it,
| but what is this talk of productivity programs being some sort
| of nirvana before 200x?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I sympathose with the author, bit I shouldn't have to scroll
| past that to find out what does the tool he is raving about
| actually do. This stuff can go below that
| Vinnl wrote:
| Also no install though.
| kazinator wrote:
| Ah, but this business of being prompted to create an account
| also afflicts software that requires installation.
| kavalg wrote:
| they do have a docker image (no collaboration though)
| remus wrote:
| It's actually a pretty good example of a PWA which can be
| installed (depending on whether your platform supports it,
| works well with chrome and windows, sorta works on iOS but
| more fiddly. Havent tried firefox).
| Vinnl wrote:
| It can be, but I was mostly trying to list a benefit that
| the "good old" apps _didn 't_ have, i.e. not _needing_ to
| install it.
|
| That said, I'd also misunderstood the grandparent comment:
| they meant that it's a shame that Excalidraw is one of the
| few apps nowadays that have these features, even if the
| other ones also have advantages like not requiring an
| install.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I originally was going to sarcastically point out that this
| just means it's at the early stages of the process, when it
| needs to attract the power users and early adopters. Once
| they're on board they can start to annoy everyone and take
| advantage of the lock-in to attract more users while preventing
| current users from leaving.
|
| I then read that it was free and open, so felt bad, but did
| notice an ad for Excalidraw+, which basically means my cynical
| first take is likely to come true eventually, as that is what
| the market will optimize towards.
| [deleted]
| dgb23 wrote:
| Not sure what you are comparing this against?
|
| ---
|
| First of all it's a free, open tool, MIT license, that is also
| hosted for free.
|
| It loads instantly without an installation step. You just type
| in the URL and it works.
|
| It's not a "productivity program" specifically as illustrated
| in the article.
|
| The design is very simple, intuitive and deliberately
| minimalist, while it does quite a bunch of subtle things under
| the hood that harmonize with the overall goal of the program.
|
| ---
|
| Now there may have been tools kind of like this in the 90's.
| Not aware of any of them from the top of my head.
| [deleted]
| michaelt wrote:
| I assume kazinator means: In Office 95, you click the Excel
| icon and it opens to a blank document with no login or
| registration or anything like that. As did drawing software,
| 3D modelling software, and so on.
|
| Of course, arguably one _did_ have to pay for it and install
| it - but that was a one-off thing.
| samstave wrote:
| Dear god - anyone here have to setup licensing servers for
| high-end 3D software from the past, like Softimage or
| Alias|Wavefront - those were a bitch, and if you lost
| connection to the licensing server, you couldnt run the
| program.
| BjoernKW wrote:
| People might be seeing this through slightly rose-tinted
| glasses.
|
| Yes, you could use Excel 95 by just double-clicking on an
| icon.
|
| However, not only did you have to buy and install the
| software, which back in the day often meant going to an
| actual brick-and-mortar store to purchase a shrink-wrapped
| box labelled "Office 95", but it even required buying a
| specific type of computer with a specific operating system
| first.
|
| In this specific case, that doesn't even take into account
| Microsoft's shady tactics of strong-arming vendors and OEMs
| into exclusively shipping Microsoft software with their
| products.
|
| So, arguably, the barrier to entry still was a lot higher
| than with even the most obnoxious growth hacking tactics we
| see in many SaaS products today.
|
| That said, I absolutely love the way Excalidraw are
| "onboarding" users.
|
| It's just worth remembering that not everything went
| downhill with SaaS products (in fact, quite the opposite)
| and not everything was better "back in the day".
| yen223 wrote:
| Shrink-wrapped software back then weren't cheap too,
| costing hundreds if not thousands of dollars per copy.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Excalidraw is akin to dia, but on the web. Also, it's more
| targeted and polished it seems, and that's nice.
| peterkelly wrote:
| Parent post was not criticizing Excalidraw, but rather
| highlighting problems with _other_ apps that are so prevalent
| today. They are saying that Excalidraw is great in comparison
| to apps that have those bad features, in other words "this
| is like the good old days".
| ctvo wrote:
| And what were those tools in the good ole days that had the
| features enumerated by the parent? Primarily free, open
| source, hosted, instant open, local storage along with the
| usability?
|
| Excalidraw feels like a product of this time, and
| demonstrates some of the things we all enjoy about the web
| as an ecosystem. People compare it to some yesteryear
| product because of its purposeful feature set and look /
| feel, but name something from back then.
| simonh wrote:
| OK it's pre-200x and you read about a new productivity app you
| want to try. You have to check it's compatible with your OS,
| figure out where and how you can buy it, wait for the diskettes
| or CD to ship or until you can visit a B&M store, run the
| installer, then manually enter a product key (fun!).
|
| You'd be lucky to have it all done in less than a week and a
| few hours of your time. How soon they forget!
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> You have to check it's compatible with your OS_
|
| You still have to today. A lot of stuff is Mac/Windows/Linux
| exclusive. Sure, I can run Windows stuff on Linux and vice
| versa if I'm tech savvy, but Mac stuff requires buying Apple
| hardware, so that's a massive barrier right there.
|
| _> figure out where and how you can buy it_
|
| Or you could just download it. The internet existed pre 200x
| as well.
|
| _> then manually enter a product key (fun!)_
|
| Honestly, it was fun. Much more fun than the phone-home,
| always-on telemetry and invasive DRM that act like rootkits &
| spyware we have today. Good luck playing older games you
| bought and paid for who's DRM require authentication from the
| publisher's servers that went offline years ago. Yeah, fun!
|
| Back then, you paid for the product, you got your license and
| CD key, you owned it forever. No subscription rent seeking
| model BS.
|
| Maybe I'm just old and cranky.
| kazinator wrote:
| You still have to today ... _and_ the darn thing will ask
| you to create an online account.
| dhosek wrote:
| _> Or you could just download it._
|
| Outside of free software/shareware, there wasn't a lot of
| software available for download in the 90s. And
| compatibility was a lot jankier in that the base systems
| sold to consumers were insufficient to run a lot of popular
| software. For folks like you or me, probably not a problem
| (unless you happened to have a graphics card that wasn't
| supported) since we'd generally have obscene (by the
| standards of the day) amounts of hard disk and RAM, but
| Mom's computer might have 4M of RAM and a 10G hard drive.
|
| Back in the floppy disk era the thing that always drove me
| nuts was that most (with very few exceptions) software
| vendors put the software key on the label of disk 1. Which
| would be in the drive when they asked you to enter the
| software key. I remember some OS/2 software that put it on
| disk 2 instead and I wanted to go to the company and kiss
| whoever it was who decided to do that.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| >You have to check it's compatible with your OS >You still
| have to today.
|
| Well - as recently as a couple years ago - even if it was a
| web-based tool, you would have to check which browser was
| supported.
|
| Things have gotten better now that Microsoft has deprecated
| the entire IE-chain and moved to Chromium-based Edge.
| Things "just work".
| simonh wrote:
| The comment I'm replying to was in contrast to modern web
| apps. Hence the reference to OAuth, etc.
| kazinator wrote:
| Online installable software became a thing pre-200X.
|
| Being prompted to create an account to use a word processor
| didn't come until later.
| zbrozek wrote:
| It wasn't as onerous as you make it seem. Certainly that last
| bit - entering the product key - is _way better_ than what we
| have today. I can save the key in a text file alongside the
| installer and the software can be reinstalled completely
| offline whenever I want.
|
| I still have my Windows 98 product key and installer stashed
| away, purchased decades ago. And I actually _used_ them a few
| months ago to stand up a VM to utilize an ancient printer.
|
| Way better for me-the-consumer than the subscription-
| everything model. When software decides to go that way, I
| usually find a FOSS alternative or cling to the last
| standalone version.
| [deleted]
| 95014_refugee wrote:
| Why is Excalidraw so slow?
| jansan wrote:
| Small criticism in case excalidraw developers are reading: Those
| shape icons look like brush shapes. Please make them hollow.
| jez wrote:
| It looks like they took the "sloppiness" off the handwriting
| mode. For me that was always the biggest turn off--I couldn't get
| over that I was penciling in some hand-written note, and for some
| reason there were two lines following my cursor, spiraling like
| twin dragons. It was so bad that my first time using the product
| I thought it was a bug or that I was using the wrong tool. The
| handwriting now is just a single line!
|
| Now my only other complaint with excalidraw is that for some
| reason on my iPad Pro in Safari, the handwriting is incredibly
| laggy, increasing the longer the stroke is. Which is weird,
| because in every other browser I've tried (Safari/Chrome/Firefox
| on various laptops) it's incredibly snappy.
|
| Glad to see things are improving! That's a sure sign of a company
| that listens to users.
| vjeux wrote:
| Yeah sorry about the initial version of handwriting, we thought
| we could do a quick hack and use the multi point line rendering
| for it but it didn't work well in practice.
|
| We switched to the awesome "perfect" library from Steve Ruiz
| instead. Could you create an issue about the lag on ipad pro,
| we should investigate and fix.
| vijaybritto wrote:
| okay so I have observed the same lagging issue in my Samsung
| Tab S6 too. I'll file an issue
| eldaisfish wrote:
| fyi, i have a different problem where some strokes are
| missing. when writing, after one stroke, the next one isn't
| detected, then the magnifier appears, then the next stroke is
| detected. Admittedly, i'm trying to write like on paper.
|
| Will open an issue on github.
| newman314 wrote:
| I started playing with containerizing Excalidraw but noticed
| that there were a bunch of security issues identified by
| Dependabot.
|
| Given that you already have Dependabot active, would you
| consider getting the dependencies somewhat up to date? Looks
| like the pull requests already exist... Thanks.
| capableweb wrote:
| Dependabot is something like a modern plague of open
| source, together with the bot that closes issues
| automatically.
|
| Did you read through the security issues identified,
| familiar with the codebase enough that you can see that
| these issues are actually affecting the product?
|
| Most issues Dependabot opens on repositories I'm involved
| in, points to issues that has no bearing on the actual
| code, since it's security issues that are involving passing
| user code to specific functions, or simply regarding APIs
| that are never used in the first place.
|
| You don't have to be on the newest version of every single
| library, in most cases it doesn't make any sense to just
| upgrade for the sake of upgrade.
| richardfey wrote:
| This. You are just swapping bugs that are known (and that
| in 99% of the cases do not affect you) with bugs that are
| not yet known (because of being always on tip release),
| for the sake of not willing to spend time checking if you
| actually need to upgrade. It does not correspond to
| higher security but rather a russian roulette game where
| you swap bullets with newer variants, all the time.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Agreed, but working out which are needed and which are
| safe often takes more time than simply rolling with the
| new release
| capableweb wrote:
| Yes, the tradeoff to get better security is more effort
| and more process.
| vjeux wrote:
| In all the years since it was rolled out, I've seen
| hundreds of security warnings but absolutely none was
| remotely close to a real security issue.
| jez wrote:
| Happy to, here are some screenshots of what I'm seeing.
|
| https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/issues/4205
|
| If there's any other way I can help please lmk.
| gcanyon wrote:
| For what it's worth, I'm not seeing any lag on an iPad mini
| 6.
| snek_case wrote:
| The upside IMO is that the sloppiness takes away a lot of the
| pressure to make things look perfect, align everything, make
| every box exactly as many pixels wide. I found I could pump out
| diagrams much faster.
| u-rate wrote:
| No desktop version that works offline? No thanks.
| adamclifford84 wrote:
| Its a PWA so you can install it to your machine locally and it
| works just like a native app.
| OOPMan wrote:
| > It forces you to stay low fidelity. Because everything is
| rendered with rough.js (I think...), objects look sloppy and
| hand-drawn
|
| Um...what?
|
| Frankly, stuff that looks like this just annoys me.
| ryloric wrote:
| I used to use it a bit to draw graphs, but I've since come across
| mermaid[0] and it's even better for this task. It doesn't have
| the kind of flexibility a mouse based tool like excalidraw has
| but it's faster and easier to use for me.
|
| [0] https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid
| malshe wrote:
| I love mermaid. I use this wrapper in R: https://rich-
| iannone.github.io/DiagrammeR/mermaid.html
| crowbahr wrote:
| I love mermaid charts and especially love that they integrate
| with my preferred markdown note-taking software:
| https://obsidian.md
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| oh nice, I'll have to see what plugins obsidian has for this.
| shados wrote:
| Mermaid is cool. Excalidraw has fantastic obsidian
| integration too though!
| eb0la wrote:
| Mermaid is great. I remember sending a diagram made with
| MermaidJs to the security officer of a big retailer and the guy
| said that that was the tool (and the information) he wished he
| had the day he joined the company.
|
| I am using PlantUML instead and C4 some time ago. Works very
| well inside VSCode, but Mermaid was quick.
| zekenie wrote:
| I want to love mermaid so much... i've tried several times. It
| just hasn't gotten into muscle memory for me yet
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Wow, its GraphViz reborn!
|
| Long live `dot`!
|
| http://graphviz.org/pdf/dottyguide.pdf
| ryloric wrote:
| Yeah, graphviz is like 30 years old I think and it's pretty
| solid.
|
| I think I finally settled on mermaid cause it fits flawlessly
| into markdown based writing or documenting software. I don't
| think it's anywhere close to dot in it's comprehensiveness
| though.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Dot rendering is ... primitive. And I need to install
| Ghostscript to render which always bugged me.
|
| Mermaid looks far more modern.
| idoubtit wrote:
| Since it's integrated in Gitlab's Markdown, I've used it for
| flowcharts and sequence diagrams, and I was very satisfied with
| it. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/tools-and-tips/mermaid/
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I am not convinced that this is better ('hand drawn diagrams').
| We've been drawing diagrams of all kinds for a very long time
| with no hurdles whatsoever [1]. Millions of diagrams have been
| drawn by boring-big-corp orgs in PowerPoint. This just reads like
| a hipster fetish over aesthetics, not substance. And if we're
| talking about aesthetics, I much prefer Monodraw [2]. I have a
| bias for having appeal for boring things may be because it works
| and gets out of the way. Emojis in your readme? No thanks.
|
| That said, the app itself has great UX, especially onboarding.
| Just straight to drawing mode. Kind of like autodraw.io.
|
| [1]
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arpanet_logical_map,...
|
| [2] https://monodraw.helftone.com/
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| The article does not seem to actually mention why Excalidraw is
| so better over the millions of diagram drawing programs already
| available for decades (many of them much more featureful). It
| just seems to mention why Excalidraw is better over your
| average website.
| jen729w wrote:
| I find it better, in the same way that finding the PowerPoint
| 'theme' that makes everything a bit rough round the edges was
| also a revelation.
|
| The perfectionist in me won't let me publish a regular, square-
| edged diagram unless it's pixel-perfect. As a result, nothing
| ever gets published.
|
| Take away that absurd situation, make the whole thing a bit
| shabby, and the need for perfection disappears. In fact the
| _ability_ to make it perfect disappears.
|
| Life changing. Sounds daft. Is absolutely true.
| brrrrrm wrote:
| "polish is illegal, allowing you to stay in idea-space"
|
| I've been noticing this design trend in other sites too and I
| really like it
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| I used this for my wedding seating plan. My wife had a link so
| she could collaborate, and we could share easily with the
| catering company, the venue, and the decorator so that they could
| put everything in the right place.
|
| After the wedding, we got feedback from almost everyone that we'd
| given access to that it was a fantastic tool and it had made
| everything super easy.
|
| Absolutely brilliant experience, and I know it sounds pithy, but
| it took a load off our minds knowing that no-one would have
| different interpretations or versions or broken Excel sheets that
| didn't clarify, or ugly Paint drawings etc.
| aliswe wrote:
| Where are the drawings stored?
| franky47 wrote:
| In your browser's localStorage.
|
| Should you choose to share a drawing, it would be end-to-end
| encrypted and sent to the Excalidraw server. The sharing URL
| contains the ID of your drawing for retrieval, and the
| encryption/decryption key in the URL hash, which never reaches
| Excalidraw's servers (thus achieving E2EE).
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I believe that Safari will delete local storage after 7 days.
| I don't if they found a solution for that?
| bmsleight_ wrote:
| Possible to save the source to a .json and re-upload it.
| (Save button)
| mdoms wrote:
| The solution is use a browser that isn't hostile.
| exikyut wrote:
| _ipadshatter.wav_
| capableweb wrote:
| https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-
| blocki...
|
| > deleting all of a website's script-writable storage after
| seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the
| site.
|
| So as long as you access the application once a week,
| you're safe. Or, alternatively:
|
| > As mentioned, the seven-day cap on script-writable
| storage is gated on "after seven days of Safari use without
| user interaction on the site." That is the case in Safari.
| Web applications added to the home screen are not part of
| Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use.
| Their days of use will match actual use of the web
| application which resets the timer. We do not expect the
| first-party in such a web application to have its website
| data deleted.
|
| Still, horrible idea and horrible implementation, but I
| think it's known by know that Apple/Safari will always be
| hostile towards web apps as it cuts into their own App
| Store revenue.
| personjerry wrote:
| So this is the free, online, collaborative Balsamiq substitute
| I've been looking for?
| toyg wrote:
| "You know how I know Berner-Lee's dream is dead? When I read a
| long blog post about how fantastic a tool is, and there is NOT
| ONE SINGLE HYPERLINK TO THE GODDAMN TOOL."
|
| "Oh, just google it"
|
| "Yes, but google was not present in the WWW design, was it? And
| then you have to worry about fakes, clones, phishing sites... The
| new generations turned the web into an interactive newspaper with
| more ads."
| winter_squirrel wrote:
| Not much can come off as more pretentious than someone
| pretending to have a conversation with themselves about how
| they would win an argument.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > google was not present in the WWW design, was it
|
| That's because you were supposed to Ask Jeeves.
| toyg wrote:
| Not if you were on a big mountain, enjoying an Alta Vista
| jshprentz wrote:
| Watch out for Dogpile.
| codazoda wrote:
| Or, comfortable in your living room getting your coffee
| from a HotBot.
| doodpants wrote:
| Back in the early days there were so few web sites that
| you didn't even need a search engine; any old Yahoo could
| tell you what all of them were.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Going in circles around them like a ring.
| kerridge0 wrote:
| Like a dog chasing it's tail. Or bundling them together
| like a dogpile.
| fingerlocks wrote:
| Or, engaging in some late night bedroom Yahoo with your
| partner.
| fredland wrote:
| Ah, much excite at home, as they say.
| dhosek wrote:
| Or wrapped up in the web by a Lycos
| nanodeath wrote:
| Isn't the first word of the article a link to the tool? Maybe
| it was added after your comment.
| zekenie wrote:
| Fair point! Added it
| bena wrote:
| Ah. Because I saw his critique and I clicked on the article
| to see if that was true. But you must have added by then
| because I saw it right there at the top.
| toyg wrote:
| Let it never be said that complaining on a web forum is
| useless! Express yourself, bitches.
| necovek wrote:
| There was a screenshot showing the URL: I simply typed it in :D
|
| Sometimes, even when I google things out, I type the URL in
| myself to avoid going through multiple redirects on google.com
| pages and to give me a clean copy-pasteable link right away.
| thorin wrote:
| Ha ha, I was thinking exactly the same thing.
| acomjean wrote:
| I thought I missed it too. FYI:
|
| https://excalidraw.com
|
| whew..
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Dunedan wrote:
| What I dislike about Excalidraw is the handwriting font. While it
| might look cute it hurts readability, which is something which I
| believe shouldn't be a compromise for stuff like technical
| documents.
| bzzzt wrote:
| Sometimes it's not about looking cute, but to signal the
| 'sketch' phase from a design. When a sketch looks too
| professional there's going to be a disappointed pm or customer
| because it looks like it's almost finished when it's not even
| implemented.
| Dunedan wrote:
| If that's what happens in your org I believe there are more
| serious problems than choosing the right font.
| addcninblue wrote:
| There are three selections for fonts! The monospace one is
| quite nice and readable.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| All 3 of them are terrible! The handwritten one is really
| bad, I'd actually prefer Comic Sans. The fixed width font
| looks very inhomogeneous. The sans-serif is okay, but the
| serious "a"s clash with the playful style of the drawings.
| fstrthnscnd wrote:
| You should probably show a confirmation box when leaving the page
| - if that's possible - unless that feature is disabled in demo
| mode?
| mdoms wrote:
| Your drawing is saved when you leave the page. Dialog boxes are
| for destructive actions. There is no demo mode - what you're
| using is the full product.
| asiachick wrote:
| Excalidraw might be good for it's intended purpose but I was
| introduced to it as an online interview tool and for that it
| completely sucked.
|
| The most important missing feature at the time was that to
| doesn't show other user's selections unlike many other
| collaboration tools. That means what you see is not what you're
| collaborators see. If you grab some shapes they don't see that
| you grabbed them. If you highlight a word or item in a list, they
| don't see you highlighted it.
|
| Further, unlike pretty much all similar software, they don't
| connect shapes and text. Place a shape, double click, a text box
| appears in the center of the shape. Drag the shape, the text
| doesn't go with it. This makes it super inefficient for most
| common use cases. People might want to separate the text from the
| shape but I'd argue that's an exception and should not be the
| default.
| wikibob wrote:
| The text not being attached to the shapes makes it unusable for
| me.
|
| Also agree on missing some kind of laser pointer and or
| highlighter.
| adamclifford84 wrote:
| The way Ive worked around that is to group the text and shape
| together, so they move as one.
| dwelle wrote:
| > the most important missing feature at the time was that to
| doesn't show other user's selections unlike many other
| collaboration tools. That means what you see is not what you're
| collaborators see. If you grab some shapes they don't see that
| you grabbed them.
|
| This should work out of the box if you're collaborating. But,
| we've recently upgraded our collaboration servers and due to
| ServiceWorker caching it may be your colleague (or you) were
| connecting to the old one. Try hard refresh your browser.
| zamadatix wrote:
| If Exaclidraw seems too simple for your needs check out draw.io.
| Very similarly you can just open the page and start diagramming,
| you can choose to save to device or link to a cloud account later
| if you want. It tends to scale well into long term diagrams but
| doesn't have as simple an interface as a result.
| Zaheer wrote:
| Link to Excalidraw: https://excalidraw.com/
|
| Since there was no link in the article :)
| trzeci wrote:
| Ha! That was a disturbing to read about something without any
| visible link to see it. :)
| zekenie wrote:
| Thanks, just added one
| beebmam wrote:
| I genuinely can't stand the default font, and so many people tend
| to use it. My dyslexia makes it really difficult for me to read
| it. Please, please, Excalidraw owners if you're reading this:
| make the default font something that's much more friendly to
| those with dyslexia.
|
| Defaults matter a lot.
| vjeux wrote:
| We've open sourced the font and made a lot of small but
| important changes to it over the past 6 months. If you are
| willing to help, it would be great if you could open an issue
| with specific words that are difficult to read with your
| dyslexia and we can figure out how to tweak the font to remove
| the ambiguity. Thanks for bringing this up!
|
| https://github.com/excalidraw/virgil
| kataklasm wrote:
| To be honest, I don't believe we should adapt defaults to fit a
| single digit percentage population. I'm not dyslexic and the
| fonts suggested are horrible to read in my opinion. I'm totally
| for the option to set different fonts as default so dyslexic
| users have an easier life, but the global default should not be
| changed because of this.
| rkangel wrote:
| There is an important school of design thought that you
| should design for the people with the biggest handicaps, and
| by doing that you make it the best for everyone. E.g. If
| you're making a car, make it easy to get in and out for the
| elderly and then it'll be joyously easy for everyone else.
| Another classic example of this is the "Oxo Good Grips" range
| of kitchen utensils.
| arkades wrote:
| You're applying it over-liberally. That school of thought
| is to apply accessibility features that maximize
| accessibility for /everyone/ - eg, automatic door openers.
|
| Features that improve accessibility for a subpopulation
| while decreasing it for the broader population are /not/
| part of that thesis.
|
| The topic of dyslexia friendly fonts falls somewhere in
| between. Some fonts are considered friendlier than others
| and are fine for the general population (verdana), others
| are friendlier to dyslexics but hideous to the general
| population (open dyslexia). I call it a gray area because
| they're ugly, and do not improve readability for the
| general population, but not overtly inaccessible to the
| general population.
| kdelok wrote:
| Not sure it helps, but I submitted
| https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/issues/4206
|
| Feel free to jump in on it
| janvdberg wrote:
| Honest question: what is a good font for dyslexic people?
| TorKlingberg wrote:
| Controversially: Comic Sans. It turns out to be very readable
| for short bits of text, especially for people with dyslexia.
| brianmcc wrote:
| https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/typeface/
| politelemon wrote:
| Another one is OpenDyslexic
|
| https://opendyslexic.org/
|
| Notice how parts of the letters are weighted. That helps with
| identifying which part of the letter is bottom.
|
| And its monospace equivalent for coding is OpenDyslexicMono
| GordonS wrote:
| As someone without dyslexia, I find that really difficult
| to read! I'm all for accessibility, but I personally
| wouldn't want this to be the default - would be great if
| users with dyslexia had the option to set it as their
| default though.
| rbinv wrote:
| Tampermonkey should be able to enforce typefaces across
| websites: https://www.tampermonkey.net/
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Hm, I do not have dyslexia either and I find it maybe a
| bit odd at first glance, but not difficult?
|
| Is it maybe just a matter of getting used to it?
|
| Otherwise sure, the bewt option would be probably for
| people to use their own font and make it easy to do so
| (@browsers)
| tomthe wrote:
| Interesting! I haven't heard of something similar before.
| Does it help you to read?
| politelemon wrote:
| Oh sorry I wasn't clear, I get these fonts for my
| coworker(s) who have accessibility issues, so I just
| listen to what they say. This open one was their current
| preference.
| arkades wrote:
| Surveys of the dyslexic population suggest that the crowd
| favorite is Dyslexie. Even a. Lot of dyslexics hate
| opendyslexic.
| gjvc wrote:
| this reminds me of the Draw application from RISC OS
| alberth wrote:
| Off topic: it's always surprised me that Microsoft never released
| an Online/Cloud version of Visio.
| nadam wrote:
| >if you're building a tool and you want your users to love you
| and to tell their friends ... >Don't upsell
|
| This is good advice for people for whom money is not a concern
| anymore, and their goal in life is to make random hipsters on the
| internet 'love them'. For the rest of us the goal is to make
| money with our work (and we get the love mostly from our family
| and friends.)
|
| What a one-sided article with so many upvotes...
| yummypaint wrote:
| Users can tell when developers choose to accomodate themselves
| rather than improve UX. An upsell isn't just an upsell, it
| creates mistrust and triggers memories of the thousands of
| long-gone companies who milked their users for everything they
| could before abruptly dissappearing.
|
| The requirement that a piece of code make money is a major
| liability and automatically throws its future into question. It
| means the metric has changed from "does this solve the
| problem?" to "does this make enough money?"
|
| When desperate measures are being taken to monetize code,
| people sensibly run away. Users just want to use tools that
| work without getting jerked around.
| stnmtn wrote:
| I don't understand how this comment is anything other than
| "beggars can't be choosers"
|
| You want free software, that never asks you for money, that
| stays updated?
| zekenie wrote:
| Hi! It wasn't my intent to be one-sided, just to share _my_
| perspective, which I guess you could say is by definition "one
| sided" :)
|
| The creator of Excalidraw made a comment somewhere else on this
| page about how well Excalidraw+ is doing.
|
| > The plus plan has been very successful from my point of view,
| we've been able to bootstrap the business and make our first
| hire. The key realization is that while the unauthenticated
| open source model works really well for individuals, it's hard
| for companies to adopt.
|
| > They want authentication, security policies, private spaces
| to collaborate, access control, search... all of this requires
| having a company behind it in practice and the open source
| model doesn't work as well.
|
| > The two versions so far work really well alongside each other
| right now.
|
| I think there are certainly products out there that can't pull
| this off. And, that's a fair point.
| piokoch wrote:
| "Too see what's possible, hit the question mark in the lower
| right corner" this works, almost...
|
| I have vimium installed so ? displays viumium help. This is a
| remainder that still there is a gap between native apps and in-
| browser apps. Yes, it is shrinking, but browser was never
| designed as the platform the run full-featured applications. So
| expect the unexpected.
|
| But, true, comparing to other software of this kind this one
| looks really good.
| tiddles wrote:
| You can go into insert mode with i, then keys like question
| mark will be forwarded to the site.
| onion2k wrote:
| _browser was never designed as the platform the run full-
| featured applications_
|
| Does that mean they shouldn't ever change to become a platform
| for full-feature applications? Is there a reason why browsers
| shouldn't evolve and grow and add new capabilities? We don't
| believe that operating systems should be static once they've
| been released, or that applications should never add new
| features that enable them to run scripts or plugins. What's
| wrong with browsers doing more than Tim Berners-Lee envisioned
| 30 years ago?
|
| Sure, browsers were once designed to view docs. Now they do
| more. That's a good thing even if it throws up some design, UX,
| and security challenges.
| capableweb wrote:
| > "Too see what's possible, hit the question mark in the lower
| right corner" this works, almost...
|
| I think they are referring to the actual button in the UI,
| which is in the button right, not the "?" key on your keyboard
| which might or might not be in the bottom right in your
| keyboard.
|
| Anyway, as a user of Vimuim, you're surely used to keyboard
| shortcuts already being funky, and you know about the "escape"
| mode it surely offers in order to trigger keyboard shortcuts
| that conflicts with your own bindings. Just use that instead of
| complaining as it's your own setup that makes things difficult,
| not the website owners fault really.
|
| It's a bit like writing something like "Hey, I use a extension
| that makes all elements background black on page load, and on
| your website, since the text is already black, makes it very
| hard to read stuff"
|
| I say this as a vim-keybindings-in-browser user myself too.
| User23 wrote:
| > When you first open it, it looks kind of sloppy. It almost
| evokes Kidpix
|
| Kidpix. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
| cdaringe wrote:
| 10/10 app. Kidpix4lyf3
| barbs wrote:
| If you're in the mood to take a trip down memory lane:
|
| https://kidpix.app/
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Oh no!
| lqet wrote:
| For anyone looking for a drawing editor to produce professionally
| looking diagrams, I can only recommend ipe [0].
|
| [0] https://ipe.otfried.org/
| aj7 wrote:
| Amazing.
|
| Brings me back to the Mac 1984 days,
|
| Gonna have to pay these guys.
| dang wrote:
| Past related threads:
|
| _Excalidraw+_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034119 -
| May 2021 (31 comments)
|
| _Show HN: It was fun generating version distributions charts for
| Excalidraw_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25792169 - Jan
| 2021 (1 comment)
|
| _One Year of Excalidraw_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25608336 - Jan 2021 (19
| comments)
|
| _Show HN: Create a Slideshow with Excalidraw_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081914 - Nov 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Excalidraw whiteboard - easily sketch diagrams with a hand-
| drawn feel_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525648 -
| June 2020 (54 comments)
|
| _Building Excalidraw 's P2P Collaboration Feature_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719576 - March 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Show HN: Excalidraw - Sketch Hand-Drawn Like Diagrams_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146973 - Jan 2020 (6
| comments)
|
| _Excalidraw - a whiteboard tool to sketch hand-drawn diagrams
| (excalidraw.com)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104502
| - Jan 2020 (3 comments)
|
| _Excalidraw - a whiteboard tool that lets you sketch hand-drawn
| diagrams_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101381 - Jan
| 2020 (21 comments)
| eranation wrote:
| Thanks for the related links! It just shows what an amazing job
| to whomever leads Excalidraw does. They should be the poster
| child of PLG GTM done right. Fast time to hello world / time to
| value, doing the small things that make you not just use the
| product, but love the product. The difference between an MVP
| and an MLP. It's interesting how it's so rare that it makes so
| many of us praise them for no apparent reason other than spread
| the joy. p.s. that issue with worrying about pixel perfect
| alignment and having them do it "sloppy" so you don't worry
| about it, I wonder if that was intentional, if it was, genius
| move, as I think it's a fair assumption that wasting time on
| making things pixel perfect is something a lot of us suffer
| from...
| amelius wrote:
| How do you rotate artwork in Excaildraw?
| vjeux wrote:
| If you select an element (or groups of elements) there is a
| little circle that appears at the top of the selection
| rectangle, you can drag it around to make it rotate.
| queuep wrote:
| Umm, when I use Draw.io I can create a box and double click(or
| just select and start writing) it to write text inside it. How do
| I attach text to a figure in this tool? Feels weird when I move a
| figure and I need to select the text and the figure.
| comma_at wrote:
| select them and group them (Ctrl+G or find it under Actions on
| the left bottom part of the screen)
| and0rskr wrote:
| yes. I tried this tool for the first time and the best way I
| found was just to make a text block and group it with the box.
| But it would be great to just be able to double click the box
| and auto-center a text block it within the box.
| vjeux wrote:
| Yeah, this is one of the top things we want to address. Right
| now text and shapes are not linked with each other which makes
| it super annoying to use.
|
| We just shipped image support which has been widely requested,
| this is next in our list.
| bidirectional wrote:
| Great tool, but I find the name quite strange. To me it's
| incredibly evocative of the 90s.
| Veuxdo wrote:
| I mean, it's good, but it's a drag-and-drop diagramming app.
| Great for simple, ad-hoc diagrams, but not great for big/long-
| term projects.
| tunnuz wrote:
| Totally agree with this. I discovered Excalidraw by chance a
| couple of years back, and I couldn't believe what I saw. Free (as
| in beer and as in speech), instantly usable, useful features
| coming out over time. I converted several people in my company to
| use it, and to date use it to explain ideas in shared sessions (I
| have a visual thinking and this really helps me getting concepts
| through to other people). My secret dream is to be able to build
| a bunch of tools like this (not for diagramming, for different
| things) that people love to use.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Why is there no move tool? That makes it difficult to use with a
| drawing tablet.
| vjeux wrote:
| Agreed. It was originally developed for desktop use cases and
| we did a straight port to mobile which surprisingly worked way
| better than I anticipated.
|
| But we need to do another pass at it, the lack of move tool is
| really annoying indeed. I also want to add more gestures.
|
| Procreate is so good and we should aim to be a similar
| experience.
| shaicoleman wrote:
| Use the select tool to move things
| dwelle wrote:
| It's coming...
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Small detail: the group/ungroup icon is really well done.
|
| Also, I like the name; glad they didn't call it "Drawify"
| "Charitify" "Whitebordify" "Thinkify" ... you get my drift.
| nobleach wrote:
| Excalidraw is one example I use of software done right. They had
| a vision for what they wanted to provide. Their MVP was
| functional, and it scratched the basic itch. Since then, they've
| been adding features which only make it more awesome. It was
| already good, but they continue to make it great.
| thorin wrote:
| I mean, it's ok, I just used it for 10 mins and it seems to work
| well. I like the simplicity. For me, draw.io strikes the right
| balance of simple enough and free with enough features to
| actually replace stuff like Visio for my use case especially as
| the orgs I work for seem to be dropping the Visio licenses for
| all, which makes it essentially useless.
| pantulis wrote:
| Draw.io is amazing too but the cognitive load is much too heavy
| for sketching (although you definitely can).
| davidjgraph wrote:
| https://sketch.diagrams.net
| atentaten wrote:
| mind blown from not knowing this existed...
| pantulis wrote:
| Count me impressed, sir, and thanks for this.
| justusthane wrote:
| draw.io (now diagrams.net) is great! One killer feature: if you
| save your diagram as a PNG, the PNG contains the diagram itself
| as metadata! This means that anyone can view it as an image,
| but if someone opens it in diagrams.net they can edit it!
| WickyNilliams wrote:
| Excalidraw can do the same for both png and svg iirc
| thorin wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out, I'd never realised that before.
| jacob_rezi wrote:
| Don't upsell (or if you do, do it tastefully)
|
| Example of a saas that does this?
| albertzeyer wrote:
| A similar app without the sloppiness but also very easy to use is
| draw.io. I am so far very happy with it and it looks good.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| It lacks the whiteboarding feature right?
| davidjgraph wrote:
| https://sketch.diagrams.net uses the same rough.js lib as
| excalidraw
| pkilgore wrote:
| I pay for a pro plan even though I barely ever remember to log in
| just because I want to make sure this thing sticks around and
| continues to get love.
| Thaxll wrote:
| And yet the paid version has everything OP is complaining about:
| https://plus.excalidraw.com/?utm_source=excalidraw&utm_mediu...
| ac42 wrote:
| The Python of drawing tools.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I miss the days when these things would be desktop apps.
| petepete wrote:
| Excalidraw is the only PWA I use. Shipping a cross-platform
| native app would be a massive pain.
| numlock86 wrote:
| You mean the times when a developer only had to provide a
| single version for a single OS instead of what we have today?
|
| Excalidraw can be used on basically everything that has a
| compatible browser: Windows, almost all Linux distros, macOS,
| Android and iOS, major BSDs ... and that's not even counting in
| x86 vs x86_64 vs all the different versions of ARM machines we
| have now. Try to reach all those people without a tech stack
| based on web. Sure, you can still get desktop and mobile apps
| by cramming everything into electron or its mobile
| counterparts, but then we are back to comments like "I miss the
| days when desktop apps were less than 100MB"?
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| magpi3 wrote:
| And it can disappear tomorrow if they developers so choose.
| Maybe instead it would be better to say I miss the days when
| I had some control over my apps.
|
| Of course I know excalidraw is open source, so someone could
| just fork it if the developers gave up on it. But this is
| only true with open source web apps.
| capableweb wrote:
| I'm agreeing with your overall point, just wanted to share
| that APE (actually pdrtable executable)[1] actually can
| create a single binary that runs on Linux + Windows + Mac +
| FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD, truly impressive.
|
| - 1, https://justine.lol/ape.html
| ricardobeat wrote:
| That only solves 10% of the problem, binary portability.
| You still need to code for a dozen different graphics, I/O,
| storage etc system APIs.
| magpi3 wrote:
| You can write it in Java.
| capableweb wrote:
| For that, see https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/ (C as a
| build-once run-anywhere language) and
| https://redbean.dev/ (single-file distributable web
| server)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dgb23 wrote:
| How would it be an improvement over this?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Hey Zeke, just wanted to give a bit of feedback on the site. I'm
| looking at it on an iPad, and the side margins are 100% edge-to-
| ege.
|
| I'd suggest a 20-pixel gutter on either side of the page.
|
| Looks like an interesting product. Thanks!
| zekenie wrote:
| Hey! Thanks. I just tweaked the breakpoint for the padding.
| politelemon wrote:
| > Are there any flashy overlay tours with annoying animations and
| pulsing buttons? Is there a modal upselling you on a paid
| plan[1]? No. You're just in product, able to use it.
|
| This describes my first time experience with Miro. I just wanted
| to get started, but each new action resulted in another 'tour'. I
| patiently exited each tour, only to be hit by another
| tour/upsell/modal/what's new. Within 2 minutes I've now formed my
| first impression of Miro as being 'infested', and I reflexively
| microshudder when people talk about it.
|
| First time user experience feels severely underrated by many
| companies.
| peterkelly wrote:
| It's like how some games will force you to sit through a 10
| minute intro, followed by a tutorial level with "helpful"
| characters telling you how to use all the controls, instead of
| just dropping you straight into the action.
| the_other wrote:
| You get them even when you're perma-logged-in to a corporate
| account. (Ok, they're "try our new feature" not "upgrade", but
| they're still an obstruction to "getting stuff done").
|
| My eyesight's not great. I typically use my computer at about
| 1.7x with pan&scan following my cursor. It's not ideal but I
| can see (and am a career front-end dev with global brands on my
| CV). ANY kind of attention grabbing device is 1.7x more
| distracting to me than someone who can use their machine w/out
| zoom. I rely far more on my memory of where content and
| controls apprar than a fully sighted person, so having to find
| a new control (close) for a popup I didn't ask for is a
| significant workflow impediment.
| verisimi wrote:
| What an amazing tool! Thanks for posting!
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Web only, correct?
|
| I wouldn't mind an offline version. I usually need to do this
| kind of work on planes.
| adamclifford84 wrote:
| Excalidraw is a PWA, so you should be able to install it as an
| app on your local machine and use it off line.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I haven't tested it _rigorously_ but it appears to work
| seamlessly when offline.
| capableweb wrote:
| As far as I can tell, https://excalidraw.com/ is already
| possible to use offline, since it seems to be a PWA.
|
| Just a friendly reminder that "web !== requiring internet 24/7
| internet connectivity", many client-side applications works
| even if you go offline, granted you have loaded the page at
| least once before.
|
| Try loading the page, disconnecting your internet and then
| doing a hard-refresh/reload your browser.
| zekenie wrote:
| I use the pwa
| dwelle wrote:
| You can install it as PWA app both on your mobile (added to
| your home screen) or desktop that works offline :).
| nubela wrote:
| Is there something like Excalidraw but "drawn" with keyboard
| instead of mouse+keyboard? I'd really prefer not to use my mouse
| as much as I can.
| escot wrote:
| Im making that at least for graph editing:
|
| https://www.knotend.com
|
| Its a general purpose DAG/flowchart editor completely optimized
| for keyboard shortcuts. No need to touch the mouse almost ever.
| Like excalidraw you can use a basic version immediately, no
| account. I recommend watching the 1min video and checking out
| the keyboard shortcuts menu because its a bit different from
| other flowchart editors.
|
| 1min tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPR0samb194
| idorosen wrote:
| There's dotty, or pgf/TiKZ in latex.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I like textdraw from my distro's repo.
|
| It's very basic and probably not for everybody but I usually
| use r for rectangle, t for text and l for line, then copy and
| paste or screenshot.
| kolla wrote:
| you want etch a sketch?
| https://jenniferdewalt.com/etch_a_sketch.html
| ethanbond wrote:
| Yeah I really want a design tool that's built around a CAD or
| vim-like keyboard input mechanism
| mplanchard wrote:
| According to a friend who works adjacent to them, this was made
| by the same person that created prettier.js, and both were
| developed as part of their work at FB. I haven't independently
| verified, but that's certainly an impressive portfolio if true.
| vjeux wrote:
| I technically didn't create prettier, James Long did. But I
| brought it from a 3-weeks prototype over the winter break to a
| production ready tool used for all Facebook codebase and
| nowadays to most of the world.
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| Balsamiq is better
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