We just started a thread on our forum about whether we should allow only paid accounts to have private drawings, and make all drawings in free accounts public. Please visit the forum and voice your views there.

Over the last few weeks we added a couple of key features:

1. Enhanced undo: Now you can undo others changes as well as your own. E.g. if you draw a rectangle, then someone else sharing the drawing draws a circle, and then you draw a line; you can simply undo in this order: line->circle->rectangle (or redo in the opposite order). Also your history is kept intact per drawing even when you switch drawings, so if you edit drawingA, then work on drawingB, then return to drawingA, you can still undo the last changes to it. Truly unlimited undo!
2. Embed support: We released a brand-spanking new developer API a few weeks back, but that didn’t directly benefit most of our users. But now any user can click the “Embed …” button and embed a live whiteboard widget with your drawing on any webpage. You can also choose to embed just the static image (e.g. in Google Docs); the image is updated whenever you click Save.
3. You can change the canvas size by just entering width and height now. Click “Settings” to reveal the option.
4. When you make a selection, you can use the “Highlight” tool to highlight it to all other users too.
5. Other minor tweaks: There’s now a handy “Unsaved” message that shows next to the drawing name if you haven’t saved your last changes. The “New” button now gives you the option of “New drawing” or “Clear canvas (of current drawing)”. Etc.

Hope you find them useful. As always, let us know if you’d like to see any feature added or improved.

We mistakenly ran a broken script today (Jan 21 2009) that corrupted the database. We had to restore from our daily backup snapshot. The result of this is:

1. We have downtime currently, expected to last a total of 30 mins.
2. We’ve lost the data that you created in the last 9.5 hours (12:00am to 9:30am PST, or 8:00am to 5:30am GMT). This includes new user accounts created in this timeframe as well as updates to drawings.

We messed up, and we’re really sorry . We’re still working on bringing the server back up, and will update this post as we do so…

Update: And we’re back online. Downtime was more like 40 minutes. Everything seems to be working okay now. Once again, we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. I feel especially bad about the loss of data that was created in the last ~9 hours; I know many of you spend a lot of time creating complex drawings on Dabbleboard and I can imagine how frustrating it must be to see your work vanish into thin air.

Please free to drop us an email at contact@dabbleboard.com if you have any concerns, or just to vent your frustration. If there’s anything we can do to make up for this, please let us know.

Here’s a great talk by Dan Roam about how you can solve any problem by a “back of the napkin” sketch. The entire video is worth watching, but if you’re short on time, the first 6 minutes are especially significant.

Favorite quote: “We are fundamentally visual creatures”. He also talks about how we all know how to draw before we know how to read/write, but somehow we stop drawing as we grow up.

A lot of stuff he says resonates with us. And this is why we do what we do: we want to help people express themselves visually. Hmm… would “Get visual!” be a nice tagline?

We released some significant changes in the last few days:

1. Improved shape recognition engine: We’ve made the algorithms smarter, so you should find Dabbleboard detecting the right shapes more often, hopefully always. Let us know if you still find wrong shapes being detected (e.g. triangle when you wanted a rectangle).
2. New selection system: It was always a pain to hold down the Shift key when needing to select multiple objects. Now when you click in any empty space, you’ll find a tool that you can click to select a rectangular area. And just click objects to add or remove them from the selection. To deselect everything, just click in any empty space.
   Background: We never liked having to hold down the Shift key, but couldn’t figure out the right solution to the multi-selection problem. We really didn’t want to add a Select tool to the toolbar like all other drawing apps (we almost gave up and gave in though!), because it’s annoying to keep returning to the toolbar when switching between drawing and selecting. After literally months of going back-and-forth with various ideas, we had a Eureka moment with this one. It seems obvious now, and we feel stupid for not finding this solution sooner, but we’re glad we finally did.
3. Save button: This is for all of you that need to push the button to feel safe. Right now, we’re still saving the drawing continuously as well (when it says “Saving… Saved”), but soon we’ll stop doing that. We’ll still auto-save every-so-often (like Gmail or Microsoft Word) but not every second like now.

Happy new year! I know many of you have been waiting for this release, and now it’s finally ready: the Pro version of Dabbleboard. The Pro version includes SSL access, SVG support, permissions control, and much more. See the Pro webpage for the details.

I also know some of you were worried that once a Pro version was made available, we’d turn off or cripple the free version. As we promised, the free version is still just as feature-packed and just as -well- free. And we’ll continue improving both the free and Pro versions further.

You may have also noticed that we dropped our beta label. That doesn’t mean Dabbleboard is finished; there’s plenty of room for improvement. It just means we will never have any excuse like “but it’s just a beta” when it comes to bugs (not that we ever used such an excuse before). We’ll work hard to keep Dabbleboard a reliable, secure and useful tool; our business depends on it.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone! I hope you’re spending time with family and friends, and enjoying yourselves in general.

We’ll be busy updating the service. We expect we’ll occasionally have server downtime during and after Christmas (but before the New Year); we’ll update this post as we determine specific times. You should still be able to use the service as usual for most hours in a day. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

Update: Our service had a few downtime hiccups around 2am Pacific Time on the 30th (we were releasing our Pro version). We expect the service to be up continuously now.

We just released a couple of significant new features:

1. Multi-page drawings under the same shared URL. Now you can use Dabbleboard to make flip-charts. The page number is kept synchronized between all users, so everyone sees the same page.
2. Ability to embed documents (PDF in the free version, various other formats in the soon-to-be-released Pro version). So you can mark up the documents, or just conduct a presentation.
   

Hope you find them useful!

We worked with CBSSports.com to create a custom whiteboard for drawing football plays. Check it out on their website. This was a great opportunity for us to leverage our technology for a partner’s specific needs. Between the service on our website, our developer API, and such custom solutions, we hope to address everyone’s need for a better whiteboard and enhance everyone’s ability to visualize and communicate.

Update: The service ended with the football season, but here’s a screenshot of what it was:

We released some useful features yesterday:

1. Text chat: It’s pretty barebones at the moment but we’ll be improving it.
2. Voice and video chat from Tokbox: You could always fire up your favorite chat client, but it just makes things a little easier if you can do everything on the same webpage.
3. Access through firewalls: Now real-time collaboration works through any type of firewall with no configuration needed. (Technical background: we were using a Flash socket earlier but are now using Comet.)

We had a few false starts getting the firewall access working, since it needed an overhaul of our server infrastructure. You may have noticed some issues yesterday; sorry about that. Things look pretty smooth now, but please let us know if you notice any issues.

What’s next? We’re working on features for Pro accounts. Don’t worry, the free version will have at least the same features as today, and we’ll continue improving it as well. If you’re interested in the Pro version, or have ideas for features for it, please let us know.