Hey, I finished my collaborative whiteboard! First instructions on how to use it: just visit http://whiteboard.appjet.net/ and you’ll be added to a random room. You can also create a specific room by visiting http://whiteboard.appjet.net/#my-room.
You can draw on the whiteboard, and everybody on the same room will see the drawing. Anyone on a given room can draw, since there’s no control of viewers vs. presenters. There’s also no “memory”, so anyone who joins a room later will start with an empty canvas.
You can change the color of the line and its width. Click on the colored input to get a nice color wheel, while the plus and minus symbols change the line width.
You can also upload images. When you upload an image you will be able to position and resize it before other people see the image. Double click the image to fixate it in place. Resizing preserves aspect ratio, since I designed this for scientific graphics and other serious stuff.
You can save the drawing, since it’s a canvas element. Just right click and select “Save Image As…” — I know it works with Firefox 3, but I haven’t tested with other browsers and I really don’t care.
The app is based on the new comet technology. That was the reason why I chose to host it using Appjet, since I didn’t want to run a Java server on my host and the Twisted backend didn’t quite work for me. In the end I loved developing the app using Appjet’s philosohpy of Javascript everywhere. It’s really easy to get started, and I managed to port and finish my app in half a day.
Feel free to use it for any need you may have.