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Having worked with mostly remote Devs for the past 5 years as a designer I have some thoughts on this.

1) bandwidth in many parts of the world is still not nearly good enough for high quality video

2) need good inexpensive remote whiteboarding tech. The MS surface TV looks good but too expensive to fit in everyone's remote office

3) initiating remote video should (either for screen sharing or video chat) be immediate, like 3 secs max, zero friction, not something you have to schedule or spend minutes setting up - just like turning your chair to talk to someone sitting next to you in an office



Remote whiteboarding is definitely a pain.

There are a ton of online whiteboard apps, but it's hard to find a good one (know of any?).

Then there's the problem that drawing with a mouse is difficult. It's hard to quickly express ideas as boxes-and-lines without something like a drawing tablet. Wacom makes some low-end ones that are pretty affordable though (like this one[0] for ~$80). Maybe that'd be a good solution, though it does require some practice to get proficient.

[0] http://a.co/du45rQr


Figma is pretty good although for all types of design. It has real-time collaboration and perf is pretty good.

Whiteboarding specifically - don't know of any good ones. It should ideally be a collaborative multi user real time web app (websockets?), support drawing on top of uploaded images, have very large canvases you can zoom/pan, and run together with hangouts/Skype or have VoIP built in. Want to collab on building one? :)

I've used many Wacom tablets - even the cheap ones are good and pretty intuitive - no real learning curve after setup.




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