I really like this trend of Posterous-inspired web apps that don't require setting up an account, just emailing into a public email address. It's what changed my mind from "eh, looks nice, might try it later when it's more robust" to "oh why not, let me email something in and see what happens".
And now the demo of your web app generates a mailing list of potential future customers along the way. Smart.
[Q:] It does funny stuff to my other pictures (not drawings).
[A:] Yes, yes it does. :)
This could open the door to worlds of fun with people who try to push the boundaries... like... I dunno, send back a picture of a garden gnome in a bikini if there's no solid background.
Really great idea, but most advanced whiteboard cleanup software includes perspective correction and things like that.. As far as I can tell this just is a color-scale modifier and sharpener.
However the idea behind the service, whiteboard cleanup via email, is pretty sound. I would love to have this with features that allow me to send the pic along with list of 'end product' recipients.
Need some https secured site as well for sensitive whiteboard snaps.
Thanks, and yes, the mvp was basic pic cleanup via email. Things like user accounts and on-line storage are on the plan.
As far as forwarding, how would you like that to work? Configure on the site? Put them in the Subject line? To keep down on spam I'd have to require an account for that kind of feature.
Yeah this seems like a great phase one offering. I'd love to see the features you describe plus maybe some line cleanup (make boxes into boxes), maybe OCR (with PDF return type), etc...
It worked pretty well, although it did produce some noise with my image. However that's probably to be expected with a service like this. Nevertheless, it made the picture much more readable.
I agree with some of the comments. The noise around the edge of the whiteboard can be distracting. OCR would be a nice touch if you can get it to work as well.
Another thing that could be useful is automatic cropping so that the picture contains more content and less empty space. Maybe have an option to divide the picture into individual photos if there's enough whitespace? That way you could have separate photos for separate diagrams.
Just tried it on an image where the whiteboard was poorly cropped -- lots of junk around the edges of the pic. The drawing itself was cleaned pretty well, but the extra stuff was distractingly multi-colored.
It would be nice if it could detect the edges of the whiteboard and crop. As Goosey mentioned, perspective correction would be nice as well.
Love the idea as an email service, and look forward to seeing what comes next.
My apologies to someone, a pic didn't make it back: [email protected] had a permanent delivery failure. No idea how to contact them...hope they were here and see this.
that's me! forwarded an old whiteboard pic just to try it out, and didn't notice the reply-to was an old work address that apparently no longer exists. thanks for the heads up!
A friendly request: if anyone is willing to share their before / after I'd love to see them (including any suggestions / requests you have for tweaking), and I'd like to put them up as a gallery, with your permission of course.
It fails miserably on my chalkboard photo test (it doesn't claim to support chalkboard, but it seems like it should - it probably doesn't take much to determine the background is all dark and run the appropriate scripts)
Your 4 step instructions have doodle@, but the actual mailto: is for wb@. It's a minor thing, but you should be consistent.
Cool idea. I think you could run pretty far with a posterous style lazy signup and more options (like the dropbox idea, some storage, etc.) Maybe support group emails, so dev@ when sent from my email address returns a response to a certain 5 people.
Yeah, right now the algorithm subtracts out smooth areas, leaving sharply defined areas mostly alone. I could look into handling blackboard drawings if there is enough interest. Good point about the consistency with the email, I'll have to make them the same. Thanks for the feedback and the ideas, thanks!
It would be neat to consider other types of images you could "clean up" or alter for people - sort of like a Posterous-meets-Photoshop app. An obvious example that comes to mind would be to remove red eye from pictures. I know a lot of photo editing apps can do this already, but just think how much easier it would be for most people to just send an email and get a cleaned up version back. Boom, done.
Don't know how feasible this is, and you've got a lot of room to grow in your current segment already, but would be neat to see where else this could be applied to!
Thanks for the suggestions. I had thought of a couple of things: simple 90/-90 rotations, removing red eye was one of them - I have to figure out an automated way of doing that. Thanks for checking it out!
Tried it out. We actually have these funky glass "whiteboards" and it still came out pretty well. A slightly higher resolution output would be nice. Handwriting is hard to read without zooming in a couple of times.
Other than that, I agree with some of the suggestions below. Cleaning up the display is probably 90% of what I want, so this is great. One note- I entered some text in the subject line; it would be nice if this got preserved somewhere to make searching my email easier.
Glad to know it worked on glass whiteboards - would you be willing to share a pic? I like the idea of preserving the subject line - make it easier to organize the photos when they come back (my camera doesn't let me give them meaningful names). Great idea! Thanks for trying it out.
I know it's just a GIMP script but I was pretty impressed at how well the returned image was.
My only advice is to make the instructions clearer. It's quite a simple idea "send a whiteboard photo to XYZ, get a clean version back" but I had to go to a second page, scroll down quite a bit, then click a few other pages to find out exactly what happens when I send a photo. I might be dimmer than the average customer though.
Customers don't need to know how easy (or hard) something is... some classmates of mine are now enjoying a trip to South Africa (to see the World Cup alongside head coach Óscar Tabárez) thanks to some clever marketing... they made a video indexing software (the indexing is totally manual) and marketed it as a solution for soccer trainers.
The actual code was much easier than our own project, but it was visually nice and it was brilliantly marketed. I'm probably going to blog about this if some of you are interested :)
Also an area of solid black turned into cyan and magenta. (The image I tried was http://i42.tinypic.com/169lppj.jpg - and yes I know it's not a whiteboard, but it looks like one.)
Sorry, I'm rescaling the image right now to roughly 800x600 to keep down on the memory usage of the process. Based on what I'm seeing today I think I can raise the maximum picture size and not rescale if it's within that size. Thanks for giving it a try.
Thank you for the example. Looks like something could be tweaked to do better on that kind of picture. Would you be willing to let me use that as an example for trying to improve the algorithm? Thanks again for trying the service.
It would be interesting to see this combined with a project management system. I imagine being able to snap your whiteboard, have the image cleaned, and placed right onto a project wiki, in one move (similar to Posterous, perhaps).
I had it like that at one point and thought it required too much scrolling to see the flow...it was also suggested that I make the '4 simple instructions' into a pretty big button saying 'Get Started Now'.
[+] [-] alabut|15 years ago|reply
And now the demo of your web app generates a mailing list of potential future customers along the way. Smart.
[+] [-] Groxx|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Goosey|15 years ago|reply
However the idea behind the service, whiteboard cleanup via email, is pretty sound. I would love to have this with features that allow me to send the pic along with list of 'end product' recipients.
Need some https secured site as well for sensitive whiteboard snaps.
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
As far as forwarding, how would you like that to work? Configure on the site? Put them in the Subject line? To keep down on spam I'd have to require an account for that kind of feature.
Thanks for trying it out.
Kyle
[+] [-] modoc|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swah|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gormo|15 years ago|reply
The only observable problem was some image artifacting where the original showed reflections of overhead fluorescent lights.
Here is my before and after for comparison:
Before: http://i.imgur.com/YjWqB.jpg After: http://i.imgur.com/Bi7pS.jpg
[+] [-] chollida1|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seancron|15 years ago|reply
Here are the before and after photos: http://imgur.com/wPgl8&G80Lz
I agree with some of the comments. The noise around the edge of the whiteboard can be distracting. OCR would be a nice touch if you can get it to work as well.
Another thing that could be useful is automatic cropping so that the picture contains more content and less empty space. Maybe have an option to divide the picture into individual photos if there's enough whitespace? That way you could have separate photos for separate diagrams.
[+] [-] mattmillr|15 years ago|reply
It would be nice if it could detect the edges of the whiteboard and crop. As Goosey mentioned, perspective correction would be nice as well.
Love the idea as an email service, and look forward to seeing what comes next.
[+] [-] habitue|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unshift|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
Thanks for all of this great feedback!
[+] [-] ydant|15 years ago|reply
Your 4 step instructions have doodle@, but the actual mailto: is for wb@. It's a minor thing, but you should be consistent.
Cool idea. I think you could run pretty far with a posterous style lazy signup and more options (like the dropbox idea, some storage, etc.) Maybe support group emails, so dev@ when sent from my email address returns a response to a certain 5 people.
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsb|15 years ago|reply
Don't know how feasible this is, and you've got a lot of room to grow in your current segment already, but would be neat to see where else this could be applied to!
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csarva|15 years ago|reply
Other than that, I agree with some of the suggestions below. Cleaning up the display is probably 90% of what I want, so this is great. One note- I entered some text in the subject line; it would be nice if this got preserved somewhere to make searching my email easier.
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lecha|15 years ago|reply
You probably know this, there's http://www.scanr.com/ that tackles a similar problem.
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
Thanks,
Kyle
[+] [-] acid_bath|15 years ago|reply
My only advice is to make the instructions clearer. It's quite a simple idea "send a whiteboard photo to XYZ, get a clean version back" but I had to go to a second page, scroll down quite a bit, then click a few other pages to find out exactly what happens when I send a photo. I might be dimmer than the average customer though.
[+] [-] GFischer|15 years ago|reply
Customers don't need to know how easy (or hard) something is... some classmates of mine are now enjoying a trip to South Africa (to see the World Cup alongside head coach Óscar Tabárez) thanks to some clever marketing... they made a video indexing software (the indexing is totally manual) and marketed it as a solution for soccer trainers.
The actual code was much easier than our own project, but it was visually nice and it was brilliantly marketed. I'm probably going to blog about this if some of you are interested :)
[+] [-] ars|15 years ago|reply
I sent a 640x411 image and got back a 800x514
Also an area of solid black turned into cyan and magenta. (The image I tried was http://i42.tinypic.com/169lppj.jpg - and yes I know it's not a whiteboard, but it looks like one.)
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electrum|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] albemuth|15 years ago|reply
http://sprng.me/154k6
p.s. that's a springpad link, awesome to just share those stuff from your phone
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pook|15 years ago|reply
It would be interesting to see this combined with a project management system. I imagine being able to snap your whiteboard, have the image cleaned, and placed right onto a project wiki, in one move (similar to Posterous, perhaps).
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maushu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JeffJenkins|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyleburton|15 years ago|reply
Thanks for the feedback.