[jstogin]

Hi everyone, I’m John from Scratchwork (scratchworktool.com). This is a project I started as a math PhD student, because I was frustrated by how difficult it is to share ideas (mainly equations and diagrams) with other people on a computer. I designed Scratchwork to make it easy to draw complicated ideas by hand. For example, you can use your webcam to scan your drawings from a sheet of paper and they will be extracted and added as digital objects on the virtual board. These drawings can then individually be selected and moved around, deleted, etc. We’re also working on tablet apps, starting with the Samsung Galaxy Tab A with S pen, a relatively affordable tablet with an inductive stylus. As with basically all whiteboard apps, multiple people can work at the same time and see each others’ changes in real time. There is support for embedded video calls, which is admittedly somewhat buggy at the moment.

As the demo video illustrates, we have plans to support recognition of math expressions, allowing you to calculate by simply selecting some of your drawings and then applying operations such as simplify, differentiate, integrate, etc. The current implementation is not available publicly yet, and this is not our highest priority at the moment, but the eventual goal is to make it very easy to do calculations without needing to type equations.

This project is still a work in progress, but I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. Definitely sign up for our beta program. Also, please be aware that we are not permanently storing data yet, and many features are only partially implemented. Finally, we’re looking to expand our development team, so if you like this project and are looking for something new to work on, contact us at [e-mail].

Enjoy!

[ai_ia]

Hi John,

Any plans of making embeddable systems for using on website?

I am building an educational website that would benefit from this tool.

[jstogin]

This is definitely something we hope to do. Since we're still getting started, it's a matter of prioritization (not if, but when). We would love to hear more from you about your needs and that could help us expedite the feature. Could you please email us at [e-mail]?

Along similar lines, we've been trying to plan an API for developers to use with our product. I'd love to hear if anyone has ideas.

[urs2102]

Hey John, this is neat! Speaking to grad students at Columbia in both the math and physics department, I could see something like this really solving a problem. What led to you making this/what makes it different from every other whiteboard app on the web?

[jstogin]

Thanks! I started making this after I bought a Macbook Air to replace my old Lenovo tablet PC. I really missed being able to draw precisely on a computer (which was possible with the tablet PC) and standard mouse input just doesn't do it for me.

Compared to other whiteboard apps, we're really focusing on alternatives to drawing with a mouse. My favorite feature (and possibly our most distinguishing feature) is the webcam scanner. It makes it really easy to scan a sheet of scratchwork and then rearrange terms and delete mistakes on the computer. Plus, it doesn't take a long time to draw the expressions, because you can do that with just pen and paper.