With more and more people working from home, or with colleagues and clients in other cities and countries, online collaboration tools have been gaining momentum for a couple of years now.
While there has been plenty of focus on conferencing, document and calendar sharing and scheduling, the area I think is often overlooked is collaborative sketching/whiteboard tools. If you’ve ever spent quarter of an hour trying to explain a basic layout idea to a client only to get confused silence back down the line, you’ll understand the beauty of this kind of application.
Although it’s been around for over a year now, I think GE’s Imagination Cubed is still the pick of the crop terms of a pure drawing tool. Exactly why GE felt compelled to build and release it is a mystery but they’ve done a really nice job. The soft shadow cast by the pen as it flicks around the work space is a very nice touch.
As you can see, the interface is very low-clutter and they offer small but effective suite of tools including pens, text tools, lines, basic shapes and icons. Each tool has access to a variety of weights, colors and even line treatments (feathered, splatter, etc).
Collaboration is easy. After initiating a new workspace, new users can be invited to join via either email or AIM. Once they’ve joined, they have access to a named pen, and are free to post IM-style messages in the attached message field. It’s all worked flawlessly for me.
Each creation can be saved and/or sent to others as a JPG. And just for a laugh you can even hit the ‘replay’ button to watch your work being re-created.
Add to that the fact that it’s free and doesn’t even require you to log in and there’s not a lot to dislike. In fact, the only problem I’ve ever encountered is the limit they place on your virtual ink — it apparently runs out and must be more expensive than it looks.
Otherwise this is at the very least a nifty toy — and perhaps even a handy solution to a problem for some.
December 1st, 2006 at 12:43 pm
That looks pretty cool! Yep the ink actually runs out…I drew circles just to see what would happen. lol.
Might start to use this tool. Thanks!
December 1st, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Are you serious? You spent an ENTIRE blog post on this? Hah. Which of GE’s subsidiaries do you work for?
December 1st, 2006 at 5:02 pm
Neat, but honestly, what the heck is the point of having the pens be able to run out of ink? I hope they designed that feature in their spare time and not on the clock.
December 1st, 2006 at 5:24 pm
Perhaps they had ideas of charging for ink refills?
Still, I haven’t actually run out of ink so far.
December 2nd, 2006 at 3:23 am
Its to conserve memory on the server — you can continue drawing, but the ink you drew at the beginning gets erased as you go. More than enough to work with though.
December 2nd, 2006 at 5:26 pm
If you are seriously interested in online live whiteboarding and annotation tools check out this nifty mini-guide:
http://www.kolabora.com/news/2006/11/02/whiteboarding_tools_and_technology_a.htm
December 3rd, 2006 at 7:25 am
December 3rd, 2006 at 6:40 pm
Ah hah! Thank you. That makes sense.
December 14th, 2006 at 8:03 am
Soon to come - generic virtual whiteboard ink-refill kits?
January 4th, 2007 at 8:42 am
It might have something to do with their terms & conditions:
That certainly put me off using it! :(
March 7th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
My thoughts reflect those of ‘me’ above. After I tried out the product, I went back to check the creds of the author and wondered what alliance there is between SitePoint and GE. That really wasn’t impressive, IMHO. Nice blog though, just didn’t concur with your estimation of the product.
March 8th, 2007 at 10:49 am
That’s a fair enough call, Lisa. We’ve used this tool a bit to decide on rough Ad layouts between people at different sites — generally with Skype. Skype has a paid sketchpad product called talkandwrite.com, but it’s no more impressive. Do you got a preferred collaborative sketch type tool?