RealtimeBoard Is a Simple Virtual Whiteboard
No virtual whiteboard is suitable for everyone, and it seems like all virtual whiteboard services are shutting down after a few years. While we’ve recommended a few over the years, the only one that still exists is Twiddla , which is so feature-rich that it might seem too complicated (and ugly) for some projects. If so, try the simpler RealtimeBoard app. If your brainstorming session involves sticking a bunch of stickers or index cards on a wall and moving them around, and you need to recreate the process online, RealtimeBoard is an easy-to-learn solution with a free collaboration option.
I’m working on an art project with a partner, and we’re putting our stories on a whiteboard to better track their structure. But sometimes we need to work remotely. So, we started using RealtimeBoard. We toss virtual stickers for each part of the story, fill them in and rearrange them. We can easily copy the stickers and attach them to the desired location. We can zoom in and out of the board quite intuitively. We can edit the board at the same time as the Google Hangouts conversation. The app helps and guides us quite simply.
Technically, we could do all of this in a writing app like Scrivener , a kanban board app like Trello or Jira , or even a spreadsheet. But all of these options seem to be either too complicated (we don’t have to assign a team member for each sticker) or too restrictive (have you ever tried to swap two cells in a spreadsheet?). Since RealtimeBoard still looks sloppy and sloppy, it helps us to work as if we were together behind a real interactive whiteboard, and not behind a piece of software. It works in a browser and in dedicated apps for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android . And it’s free.
At least it’s free for a team (of any size ) working on just a few projects at the same time. If you want to launch more than five active boards, or make boards available to only a subset of your team, you will need to pay $ 480 per year . At this point, you should take a closer look at the shops. But if you’re just a small team, try the free version.
Whiteboard apps are a strange balance of functionality and practical skeuomorphism . They are part word processor, part MS Paint, part desktop publisher, part vector editor. Even on touch-based interfaces, it is impossible to completely recreate the intuitive feel of markers, pens, and stickers on a physical board. All of this goes to show that any whiteboard app sucks. But for our purposes, RealtimeBoard really doesn’t suck.
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