Build a personal whiteboard app for boxes, arrows and sticky notes
Most of the time a whiteboard is for thinking alone: boxes, arrows, a few sticky notes, a sketch of a screen. Anticode can build a personal whiteboard app that does that well in the browser, saves your boards on your device and exports them as images. Real-time collaboration, the part most online whiteboard products are built around, needs a server it doesn't have.
Tools that cover most sketches
A whiteboard grows unusable when it tries to be a design tool. Pick a small set and make each one pleasant:
- Select and move (the default), with a box-select for several items.
- Pen with three widths and a few colours. Smooth the stroke a little so handwriting with a mouse looks less shaky.
- Shapes: rectangle, ellipse, diamond, each holding a text label.
- Connectors: arrows that attach to shapes and follow them when you move a box. This is the feature that makes diagrams feel alive, and the one worth testing hardest.
- Sticky notes in four colours, with text that wraps and grows the note.
- Text for headings and labels.
- Eraser and undo: undo and redo for every action, including moves.
The canvas
An infinite canvas you pan and zoom feels natural for brainstorming. Drawn with the browser's Canvas or SVG, it needs no outside libraries, which suits Anticode's sandbox. Ask for:
- Scroll or pinch to zoom, space-drag or two-finger drag to pan, and a Fit to content button.
- A faint dot grid that shapes can snap to, switchable off.
- Touch and pen input on tablets as well as mouse, with palm rejection where the browser reports pen input.
- Keyboard shortcuts for each tool, shown on hover.
Store items as data (a shape with a position, size, text and colour; an arrow with its two ends) rather than as a flat picture. That keeps boards editable and their saved size small.
Saving and exporting
Boards are saved in that browser on that device, with a list of boards and their last-edited dates. Because items are stored as data, a board of a few hundred shapes takes little space; freehand drawing uses more, since each stroke is many points.
Ask for export as a PNG image (and SVG if you want to edit it elsewhere) of the whole board or a selection, and test that the download works on your browser. An export and import of the board's own data is the backup; it's the only way to move a board between devices.
Describing it to Anticode
"A personal whiteboard app for planning and diagrams. Infinite canvas with pan, zoom and a dot grid. Tools: select, pen, rectangle, ellipse, diamond, arrow connectors that stick to shapes, sticky notes in four colours, text, eraser. Undo and redo. Several boards with names. Export a board or selection as PNG and SVG. Keyboard shortcuts. Clean, light grey canvas, tool bar on the left, works with a stylus on a tablet."
Anticode's model writes it as one program in the browser. Try the hard cases early: an arrow between two boxes when you move both, zooming in on tiny text, undoing a multi-select move.
Why real-time collaboration needs another tool
Shared whiteboards send every stroke to a server, which relays it to everyone else on the board, resolves conflicts when two people move the same box, and keeps the board after everyone leaves. Anticode's apps have no network and no shared data between visitors, so that can't be simulated in a useful way. If you share the published link, each person gets their own empty board.
For a workshop or a remote team, use a collaborative whiteboard product. For a single screen in a room, this app on a laptop connected to a display works well, with one person drawing. And for a diagram you'll keep, exporting an image into your documents is often what you needed anyway.
Other limits
- No images from the web on the board. Pictures from your device would have to be stored in the browser's small allowance; ask for it and test it.
- No templates from a library online; ask for a few built in, such as a flowchart, a 2×2 matrix or a user journey.
- No handwriting recognition or AI tidy-up.
For freehand art rather than diagrams, see the drawing app. For a plan of a room to scale, the floor plan maker is the better fit, and for choosing between options, the decision matrix tool.
Questions people ask
Can several people draw on the whiteboard app at once?
Not on separate devices. Each browser has its own boards. Several people can take turns on one shared screen.
Does it work with an Apple Pencil or a stylus?
Browsers report pen input on most tablets. Ask for pen support and test it on your device.
How big can a board be?
The canvas can be as large as you pan. Saved size is limited by browser storage, which shapes use sparingly and freehand strokes more heavily.