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jitsi / jitsi-meet

Jitsi Meet - Secure, Simple and Scalable Video Conferences that you use as a standalone app or embed in your web application.
https://jitsi.org/meet
Apache License 2.0
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Whiteboard improvements #12639

Closed maymage closed 1 year ago

maymage commented 1 year ago

Hi all,

using the new Whiteboard feature, I'd propose a few suggestions to improve the experience:

Bildschirmfoto vom 2022-12-04 09-45-55

maymage commented 1 year ago

Version

flatpak  info org.jitsi.jitsi-meet 
Jitsi Meet - Jitsi Meet - Secure, Simple and
Scalable Video Conferences
         Kennung: org.jitsi.jitsi-meet
             Ref: app/org.jitsi.jitsi-meet/x86_64/stable
     Architektur: x86_64
           Zweig: stable
         Version: 2022.11.0
          Lizenz: Apache-2.0
        Ursprung: flathub
        Sammlung: org.flathub.Stable
    Installation: system
     Installiert: 235,1 MB
Laufzeitumgebung: org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/21.08
             Sdk: org.freedesktop.Sdk/x86_64/21.08

          Commit: f39ab24eb998fb6ad4b5db479f1a3f…
          Parent: 4b0774a5ea9880e60cf230df8b963a…
         Betreff: Update jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage to 2022.11.0 (92824397)
           Datum: 2022-11-20 17:59:44 +0000
saghul commented 1 year ago

Hi there! Thanks for the feedback, some comments below.

  • the default arrow shape is very unclean and should default the the cleanest version offered by excalidraw

I just tried excalidraw.com and it looks the same to me, we are a few versions behind though. What do you mean by "unclean"?

  • the default text font is not hand-write-y and doesn't fit the whiteboard idea. This is in contrast to the default font on excalidraw, which is very nice. Use that or a similar font.

Not sure if this was deliberate or not, can you confirm @mihhu ?

Bear in mind that we don't aim to provide the exact same experience as vanilla Excalidraw. You can just go to excalidraw.com for that. We have made conscious decisions to hide some controls and tweak some behavior for a better product fit. This may not match your expectations, but it currently matches ours.

  • when in writing mode, the always on tool bar to the left is always visible, when the window width is larg - like in excalidraw. For cleanness the collapsed version with the bottom toolbar could be always on.

Not sure what you mean here. If you mean the options that show on the left, those are shown for each specific tool you are using, a pen or text etc. That comes straight from excalidraw.

  • The eraser is a the bottom left instead of at the top, which creates confusion and contrasts to excalidraw again. Follow the excalidraw default.

As I said above, we don't necessarily want to embed it just as-is. That said, I don't know if we moved that control deliberately, did we @mihhu ?

  • Should the Whiteboard be zoomable at all?

It should, and it is.

maymage commented 1 year ago

I just tried excalidraw.com and it looks the same to me, we are a few versions behind though. What do you mean by "unclean"?

I refer to the cleanness of the arrow, that is how tidy and neat it is drawn. Below a screen shot from excalidraw with a clean and less clean arrow, where you can see, that the unclean arrow is actually consisting of several lines. I don't think, this is a good default.

Arrows

You can adjust the cleanness in the arrow-settings-panel, see below

Arrow_Settings

Bear in mind that ... We have made conscious decisions to hide some controls and tweak some behavior

This is exactly why I hope these discussions will improve the default experience!

maymage commented 1 year ago

Not sure what you mean here. If you mean the options that show on the left, those are shown for each specific tool you are using, a pen or text etc. That comes straight from excalidraw.

Here I refer to the uncollapsed (large width of the browser) to the collapsed (small width of the browser) view of excalidraw, see the screenshots below.

Uncollapsed

Excalidraw_Uncollapsed

Collapsed

Excalidraw_Collapsed

As you can see, in the collapsed view the settings to the left are hidden behind an icon on the bottom (the second from the left). Designwise it may be desirable to always have the collapsed view to expose less settings and increase the writable space. In fact the settingspanel to the left in the uncollapsed view poses a problem for writing on the space, that is covered by that settings panel.

mihhu commented 1 year ago
  • the default text font is not hand-write-y and doesn't fit the whiteboard idea. This is in contrast to the default font on excalidraw, which is very nice. Use that or a similar font.

Not sure if this was deliberate or not, can you confirm @mihhu ?

It is one of the font options excalidraw provides and it was a design choice on our part to stick to the sans-serif version.

  • The eraser is a the bottom left instead of at the top, which creates confusion and contrasts to excalidraw again. Follow the excalidraw default.

As I said above, we don't necessarily want to embed it just as-is. That said, I don't know if we moved that control deliberately, did we @mihhu ?

At the time we created the fork, excalidraw had a much different layout and the eraser was placed on the bottom. We can move on to update our fork with their latest looks, but we're still waiting for their reply, as we're interested in making this solution easy to embed for everyone else.

I just tried excalidraw.com and it looks the same to me, we are a few versions behind though. What do you mean by "unclean"?

I refer to the cleanness of the arrow, that is how tidy and neat it is drawn. Below a screen shot from excalidraw with a clean and less clean arrow, where you can see, that the unclean arrow is actually consisting of several lines. I don't think, this is a good default.

Arrows

We can tweak it to use the clean version, I believe here the sketchy one came as default and the UX team requested that we keep the tool options at a minimum, to avoid cluttering and simplify the experience.

In regards to the settings menu on the small size view, I agree with you, it does take a lot of space, but I wonder if it doesn't come handy when looking for the tool options to have them just one tap away? We'd need a bit of testing there to see how it feels.

maymage commented 1 year ago

..it was a design choice on our part to stick to the sans-serif version

Was it for license reasons or because the font was not good enough? Would this perhaps warrant an upstream issue? The current plain font just doesn't seem right in a hand-write-y sketch context and in fact excalidraw defaults to the vergil font.

We can move on to update our fork ... but we're still waiting for their reply ..

No hurry though.

We can tweak it to use the clean version, ...

Yes, please.. on the other hand this could also warrant an upstream issue. Perhaps it's just that the "dirty" arrow is just not visually nice, but could be made better than the clean one.

In regards to the settings menu on the small size view, .. we'd need a bit of testing there to see how it feels.

If the collapsed view would become the standard view, the lower panel should not span all the screen width though.

maymage commented 1 year ago

Also the rectangles are dirty. The below pic is at 300% scaling

Bildschirmfoto vom 2023-01-05 16-09-36

The next pic is at 100%

Bildschirmfoto vom 2023-01-05 16-11-52

github-actions[bot] commented 1 year ago

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

maymage commented 1 year ago

Probably most issues here could be easily resolved by updating to the latest excalidraw and choosing better defaults.

In fact Jitsi's Excalidraw implementation seems to be based on v0.9, while Excalidraw is on v0.15 at least.

So perhaps, when an update from Jitsi's side comes, this issue could be addressed?

maymage commented 1 year ago

A further issue. Go to a Jitsi Whiteboard

Result: Fall back to Selection [1] Expected: Fall back to Pen [7]

Exalidraw has the same behaviour, unless you lock to the last action. Jitsi doesn't offer the lock.

mihhu commented 1 year ago

Jitsi doesn't offer the lock.

I know what you mean, @saghul should we add it back? The reason we removed it was because it was a confusing and very misunderstood tool. The alternative would be to make the other tools locked by default, but I didn't have the chance to check how that would pan out.

Probably most issues here could be easily resolved by updating to the latest excalidraw and choosing better defaults.

We'll try to see how this fits on our roadmap. For now it's not a major priority unfortunately.

saghul commented 1 year ago

We haven't received enough feedback to warrrant bringing back the lock icon IMHO.

maymage commented 1 year ago

@saghul How do you get that feedback though? You could ask on the Discourse channel or, what else are the usual way for Jitsi to actively query feedback? Waiting for people to file issues on Github is.. risky.. for feedback driven design.

On the other hand the upstream project will have had their reasons for their design.

saghul commented 1 year ago

@saghul How do you get that feedback though? You could ask on the Discourse channel or, what else are the usual way for Jitsi to actively query feedback? Waiting for people to file issues on Github is.. risky.. for feedback driven design.

Our community indeed, and GH issues too.

On the other hand the upstream project will have had their reasons for their design.

And we have ours. While it's the same tool, our use case is slightly different.

github-actions[bot] commented 1 year ago

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

maymage commented 1 year ago

@mihhu

would you update this issue? Or should I close and open new ones to clean up the discussion? I don't think, any of the issues raised has been addressed, right?

github-actions[bot] commented 1 year ago

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

maymage commented 1 year ago

@saghul if this issue is not useful for you or @mihhu, then just close it.

saghul commented 1 year ago

I think there nothing we plan on action on here, so I'm closing it.