I think it's important to differentiate between this whiteboarding tool and a tool like sketchboard or lucidchart, which are designed for and encourage very specific (and rather structured) kinds of brainstorming. CNVERG is definitely built to allow nascent, grey-area ideas to survive and flourish.
I love the canvas, and the freedom it provides - Trello is a great project management tool, but it forces every card into a list. Lots of cards don't belong to an individual list, or belong to more than one, and while IRL whiteboards allow for this kind of fuzziness, I haven't found a digital equivalent yet that can manage it. I'm also super stoked that you support markdown.
Caveats: it's all running a little slowly for me, and the interactions aren't super intuitive - I keep clicking on items on the board and not getting the result I expected. E.g., to me it's strange to have to right-click to make an image active and not be able to exit out by just clicking somewhere else on the canvas; and double-clicking to modify text is really strange, especially since you can still right-click to delete the text box. This might all be addressable in a more carefully structured onboarding board, though.
Nice work!
@eliservescent thanks for the great feedback! We're really focused on freeform collaboration, and the GitHub issue integration, to allow more spontaneous planning. We wanted to really model the visual management techniques that we used on whiteboards and planning walls, to allow users to adopt the tool to their process/workflow, rather than forcing their process/workflow into our tool.
That said, we do have lots of structured background templates available here https://drive.google.com/folderv....
And we'll be making them "live" with hotzones to allow for more actions taken (e.g., kanban, calendar) by moving objects onto hotzones.
Thanks very much for the UI feedback as well - @josephbader will surely like to hear your thoughts there, he's got big things planned :)
@jakirk42@eliservescent Hotzones? Like gridlines in AI etc that you can snap to but don't have to follow? Because that would be my hope.
One other thought: it's so easy to focus on engineering teams' needs, and while those are important - don't forget that even in startupland, there are plenty of us who want to integrate with things beyond GitHub (:
@eliservescent yeah we want to make draw your own hotzones that can do actionable things, using the drawing tools. Like IFTTT for tying in with other apps - visually. And while our initial focus is with GitHub, we're working on lots of other app integrations. We'd love to hear which ones you are looking for!
Hello Product Hunt! I'm John Kirk, one of the Co-Founders of Cnverg. We used to get blurry pictures of whiteboards and planning walls (or send them ourselves) and that's why we built Cnverg. Teams (especially software teams) are increasingly distributed, and visual systems like whiteboards and planning walls stop being effective the second someone's outside the room.
Cnverg gives you a shared space where your team can work with GitHub issues, sticky notes, images, text, and whiteboarding tools - all in real-time, all in the browser. Development teams can link their GitHub repos and pull issues into a space as interactive cards: create, assign, tag, create and close issues. You can either embed other Cnverg spaces to create custom dashboards to coordinate projects or planning sessions on the fly.
We're here to answer any questions! It's a gorgeous day in Austin this morning - we're hoping to get some breakfast tacos asap :)
Awesome morning - as a thank you we've got something special - 75% off coupon. (And of course we also have a Free tier). Here's how to claim your discounted account:
1.) Go to "My Account" then click the "Billing" tab
2.) Redeem coupon code PRODUCTHUNTOBERFEST (it's case sensitive)
3.) Click on the "Select Plan" button and then pick your desired plan
4.) Select whether you want Yearly or Monthly billing intervals
5.) Select a payment method or add payment info
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I've been using CNVERG in their beta for months. It's hands down the best solution in the space. Because it works on the web, you can easily get CNVERG boards onto just about any device. Makes collaborating with an international team like our super simple and effective. Pysched to see them start rolling out things like swim-lane templates (which we taught ourselves to do manually)
@p_shrihari we are working on API access with the goal for lots of integrations. We just exited private beta on Friday. Would love to talk directly - you can reach me at john@cnverg.com!
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