DabbleBoard

Sharing and discussing ideas online can be tough sometimes. Emails and chat clients are limited to text which consumes a lot of time. Some chat clients have audio and video features which make it easier for us to communicate and share our thoughts faster. They even have file sharing features which lets us share images, documents and videos with the person on the other line. Given all the tools available to us online and offline, sometimes a nice old whiteboard beats them all in expressing our thoughts and ideas.


Our featured online tool is called DabbleBoard. It’s a digital online whiteboard where anyone can make a drawing and save it as an image file. There are many online whiteboards available on the internet but DabbleBoard is by far the best that I have seen. The nice clean interface gives you the feeling of using a real whiteboard and the features are easy to understand and apply.

The web app is packed with powerful features that are easily accessible. You can draw freehand or add basic shapes in a snap. A four color palette is also available for color coding the lines and shapes. Multiple undo and redo features for mistakes adds to the usability of the web app. You can also resize and delete a drawings and shapes easily by pressing the x button (for delete) and the <->button (for resize) which appears whenever a drawing is highlighted. And of course, you can also easily insert text along with your shapes and lines.


My favorite feature is the automatic shape recognition of the application. You don’t need to select a shape you want to draw from a menu in order to produce one. Just draw away as if like you’re drawing on a whiteboard and the let DabbleBoard do the rest. It will produce a shape depending on how it recognized your drawing. You can easily produce a square or a rectangle by simply drawing a letter L or a distorted four sided figure. Drawing an arc will produce a circle or ellipse depending on the width of the arc.

The real time collaboration and quick email sharing are also key features in the usefulness of Dabbleboard. The user can choose to immediately send the image by email, download the image in the form of a PNG file or create a public link for quick viewing. Creating a public link will allow other people to copy your image and reuse it again in DabbleBoard. This will allow them to edit your drawing for faster collaboration.

DabbleBoard is still in its beta stage but the webapp is working quite well. The service could also use a social networking feature which will allow users to share drawings with selected members privately and perhaps make live collaborations. Aside from having a few minor bugs, Dabbleboard is a powerful and easy to use tool for sharing our ideas visually. Give it a try and let us know what you think.