Browserboard Update: Sharing Options and Heaps of Bug Fixes
New sharing options
It's now possible to give different people different permissions on your boards, even on anonymous whiteboards created without user accounts. Simply click the “Copy” button under View, Contribute, or Owner.
The old board sharing options are gone. Not that anyone will notice—they weren't very useful.
Image export affordances
This week, a user discovered that when a board is really big, the browser freezes when trying to export it. So I ran some tests and found that most browsers have a threshold at 16,384 (2^14) pixels where they become really slow.
Rather than add a hard limit, I decided to just show the user the dimensions of the output image, and add a warning when it's too big. I also added a progress bar so you can see how long it's going to take.
Heaps of bug fixes
There have been some minor and major issues around sticky notes and text boxes. I went into the guts of the app with a flashlight and a pair of pliers and rewired all the text stuff so it's more reliable, both in terms of user experience and data correctness. Critically, if someone starts editing a sticky note or text box you have selected, Browserboard will deselect the shape and save your text so nothing gets lost. It's not as good as having full realtime collaborative text editing, but I hope it will do for now.
“Beta”
To communicate the ever-changing nature of Browserboard, I added a little “beta” label next to the logo in the top navigation bar.
That's all for this week. Thanks for reading!