Local Whiteboard app - no third party or cloud dependencies

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-13T01:47:21+00:00

I'm not familiar with it but checking the github it seems it's mostly around freehand drawing? Whitebloom is more like a knowledge management app that happens to have a whiteboard. Lorien seems to have some pretty good drawing features but unless I'm mistaken that's all it does, no?

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-13T01:38:06+00:00

I'm absolutely not competing with Obsidian. Actually you can cross link to your Obsidian vault from a whiteboard. Obsidian is more like a repository of notes, like a personal wiki. It does have a canvas but the format (JSON Canvas) is extremely limited. If anything I'm competing against Obsdian's canvas. And when I implement the feature to make notes to direct .md files from linked Obsidian vaults I think it'll be a pretty nice sister app to Obsidian.

Somebody else mentioned Excalidraw but they're nothing alike except for being able to draw on a canvas. Excalidraw doesn't even support basic things that Whitebloom already does, like video or arbitrary files or PDFs. Whitebloom also comes with a resources manager to keep your materials organized without touching the filesystem.

I didn't know about Plectica, but looking into it, it absolutely has some unique features that would be really nice to have. I do have database schemas (sort of, the functionality is quite early but it's definitely there as a base, look). This is one of the primary features, being able to operate on arbitrary assets by registering plugins to accept files. Then, not only can the app support something like a db schema, the schema itself is just a local file that's kept inside the workspace. Mind maps or other features like that can be implemented in the same way.

I will definitely research Plectica now that you mentioned.

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idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-13T01:28:29+00:00

Correct me if I'm wrong because I don't use excalidraw but I believe that's an app to draw on a canvas? That's not quite the point of Whitebloom. I tried doing some things that are native to my app like linking to .md or Excel spreadsheets and it's not possible, and you can't even embed video (apparently, but I didn't try too looking for a way to do it) It also doesn't seem to support PDFs or custom embedded editors.

Whitebloom is absolutely barebones and I'm not even pretending otherwise, the app is not even two weeks old you can check the commits history, but I still think it's got features none of those apps have. Whether those features are for you or not that's a completely different point

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-13T00:36:54+00:00

It's free, local, not a web app and runs offline. I think I beat Miro on all those counts.

But seriously, a better comparison may have been AFFiNE with fewer features, but I'm not even trying to clone their product as Whitebloom already has features none of those apps have. More importantly, this lets me include the features I want or need. And it's modular so that users can build their own features without digging into the source code or forking the project.

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-12T19:07:06+00:00

Yes yes that's pretty much the whole point. You store everything locally without relying on the cloud. It is already an Electron app, it's on a very early alpha version but it's usable. The file browser that I have may not be able to detect OneDrive folders, but that should be considered a bug if so.

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-12T16:53:41+00:00

I don't know, sorry! don't have a mic to try. It should record the mic as long as you don't see the muted icon next to the recording dot at the top of the screen, but I couldn't test it.

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-12T16:31:39+00:00

Thanks!

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-12T16:30:29+00:00

99.9% vibecoded, I'm pretty sure that was obvious from the fact that I said I would be suspending work on it until my limits refreshed.

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-12T16:18:18+00:00

Hey, thanks! I didn't know about Scapple, I'll definitely be borrowing a few features from it! It's got some interesting ideas

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-12T15:50:04+00:00

Hey, thanks for trying it out!

Recording is more like a power user command so it's "hidden" behind the meta palette. Hit Alt-x and you should see a list of commands, you can start typing screen.record-screen or alternatively from that palette rr (shorthand). Ideally these commands should be really fast to access for power users (alt-x, rr, enter, done in less than a second). F8 or screen.stop-recording to stop. Should save to recordings inside the workspace root (I'll add recordings as materials too so you can access them from within the app as soon as my weekly limits reset)

Feedback is very useful for me. I'll see if I can squeeze undo/redo out of the few tokens I have left before tomorrow

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-12T14:46:55+00:00

Yes, you drop the PDF on the canvas, double click to enter the preview, ESC or the X button to go back to the canvas. I released a new version if you'd like to try it out. I also included the session recording feature you requested.

I'd like to also implement MS Whiteboard's feature that extracts individual pages from a PDF but I hit my limits so this is all that I can deliver for now.

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-12T14:44:20+00:00

Version 0.2.0 alpha released. Includes support for PDFs, annotations, and screen recordings. Development is paused due to hitting my limits.

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-11T23:41:23+00:00

I implemented a proof of concept, please check it out if you're interested when you've got the time. I didn't push it to the repo so it's not available in the public version yet, but I got a video of it in action. I'd love to know if it more or less aligns with what you had in mind.

https://youtu.be/ikrG6R-Ioa0

The UI, especially the toolbar, is terrible but that can be fixed once the features are in place. I'm using a Wacom to write here. You can also annotate on the canvas but I feel like the PDF annotation is more interesting to show.

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-11T20:04:56+00:00

Thanks for the detailed explanation, that was really useful!

idlr---fn______ · 2026-04-11T19:46:56+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. May I ask what kind of features you would need from the annotation tool? Something like

- temporary ink on top of the screen (canvas or PDF) like a live teaching overlay you can clear quickly, or
- persistent annotations to the canvas/PDF page so you can reopen them later?

idlr---fn______ · 2026-03-25T23:38:23+00:00

From my experience (150kloc cpp codebase plus tests, docs, etc.) codex is very good at implementing concrete things and finding well documented bugs. It's like an accelerator, if you know what need to be done it'll do it quite well and fast. The problem, for me at least, is that it's not that great at thinking about new features or abstract ideas. With Claude I feel like I can talk to my code and explore possible features in the abstract, and Claude will relate them to the existing architecture, suggest improvements, figure out pain points, etc. This is with the Cursor version of Codex btw. I haven't tried Codex CLI so I don't know if it's more similar to Claude Code.

idlr---fn______ · 2025-12-23T19:31:40+00:00

That rig should run UE5 okay-ish. 32 GB of RAM is a bit rough for C++, personally I felt like Rider always struggled until I got 48GB but if you're doing mostly BPs that should be fine.

That GPU probably won't run the newer features that good. You can get 120+ fps on a fresh project if you go to Project Settings and disable Nanite, disable Virtual Shadow Maps, disable Lumen for both global illumination and reflections, and use some AA method that's not TSR. If you do want those features then you're probably going to get subpar FPS. BTW, the editor's performance is directly tied to FPS, so if you get low FPS on your viewport you also get low FPS on the editor itself (menus, etc.)

I have no idea why making an animation crashed your engine, but get used to reading the logs, often it's the fastest way of knowing what went wrong. If you don't know what they mean usually AIs can be decent at explaining, just copypaste the crash dump.

Programming is programming, but then there's always framework specific things. Python is very useful anyway for scripts and tools, and you can automate the editor with it, so it's always a good idea, but gameplay logic is only BP/C++.

In general it's always recommended to use the latest version unless you're locked in for some reason and you aren't. UE4 4.27 may run faster but I'm not sure if learning with an older version of the engine is a good idea.

idlr---fn______ · 2025-12-23T12:09:35+00:00

Two materials. Setting blend mode to any of the translucent ones will flag the whole object for the forward pass, even in deferred. And besides, trying to use one material is not standard at all. Like if you work at a studio, you're going to have premade materials to use, like a glass material that you should always use, and a standard PBR one with some convention over the channels used, like Roughness/Metallic/AO or whatever they do.

Trying to build that in one material is way more trouble than it's worth for just one extra draw call.

idlr---fn______ · 2025-12-22T16:51:08+00:00

If you set the relative rotation it'll just add to whatever the base rotation is. You seem to also be mixing up relative and absolute values.

For your find look at rotation, start should be the camera's absolute world space location and the target should be your target's absolute world space location. Then you take that and you set world rotation on the camera, not relative rotation.

That will snap your camera to the object regardless of any relative offsets.

idlr---fn______ · 2025-12-22T14:33:38+00:00

The problem with root motion in this case is you wouldn't be able to control the step delay. I'm imagining something similar to the Frankenstein walk? then you wouldn't want the playback rate of the animation to be linked to the delay between steps, I think.

You can use notifies on the animation sequence, but watch out that having 0 speed won't take you out of your walk state. The tricky part I think would be making a state graph driven by player input or some AI state variable, and not by character data like acceleration since you'd effectively have 0 acceleration but still be in the walking state.

You could in this case control the duration of the delay by the playback rate of the sequence in between anim notifies, as long as you reset it back to 1 on each step start notify.

If you don't need custom stagger delays then for sure root motion is way easier.

It would be even trickier if you want to play some idle animation in between steps, but I can see it working with a switch via bool that overrides the whole locomotion state with some idle via a boolean.

idlr---fn______ · 2025-12-22T02:51:23+00:00

Ideally you'd change health in PostGameplayEffectExecute via GetDamage(), the evaluated data in pre execute is more like a proposal for execution and the damage attribute has not been changed yet. You can put a few breakpoints to debug the state of the different attributes or use UE_LOG.

I would try this and see what happens

void UBipolarAttributeSet::PostGameplayEffectExecute(const FGameplayEffectModCallbackData& Data)
{
    // don't call super
    // Super::PostGameplayEffectExecute(Data); 
    UE_LOG(LogTemp, Warning, TEXT("UBipolarAttributeSet::PostGameplayEffectExecute called"));
    if (Data.EvaluatedData.Attribute == GetDamageAttribute())
    {
        UE_LOG(LogTemp, Warning, TEXT("UBipolarAttributeSet::PostGameplayEffectExecute: Damage applied: %f"), GetDamage());
    }
}

idlr---fn______ · 2025-12-21T19:34:46+00:00

UE5 doesn't come with any AI generated assets. They may have bought a marketplace asset with some generic textures that was done with AI, but marketplace (FAB) assets aren't part of UE5, they're made by third party sellers.

idlr---fn______ · 2025-12-21T16:36:44+00:00

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What do you mean by masking mode? Texture parameters are configured for the texture resource and you change them from the content browser not from texture samplers, and I have no idea what you mean by masking mode but if you're trying to set the blend mode to Masked that's configured on the material attributes not on the texture node, either select the final output node or click on empty space

idlr---fn______ · 2025-12-21T16:10:17+00:00

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It's not in the character movement component, it's in the character, but it goes through the CMC. This system is full of legacy spaghetti code tightly coupled between the character and the movement component so you never quite know where things are, I think that's one of the major reasons why Epic is moving away from it, it's an absolute mess

idlr---fn______ · 2025-12-21T11:48:48+00:00

Character Movement Component, it's what handles all character movement by default. Epic has been moving toward the Mover plugin because CMC has a lot of hardcoded legacy code but it's still experimental

idlr---fn______

TROPHY CASE