your pinch draws on the board
Think with
your hands.
Handboard is an infinite, shared whiteboard you drive with webcam hand gestures. No account, no install, no keyboard. Open a link, raise your hand, and draw together.
The whiteboard is always one detour away.
You're mid-document and need a sketch. Today that means switching apps, signing in, drawing with a mouse, exporting and pasting. By the time the picture lands, the thought has gone cold.
Context switching breaks flow
Every sketch costs an app switch, a file and a paste.
Account walls block the second person
"Can you sign up first?" is where spontaneous collaboration dies.
A mouse is a poor pen
We explain ideas with our hands. Whiteboard software makes us explain them with a mouse.
Make the space beside your work a place to think: with your hands, together, instantly.
Sketch, select and copy a diagram into your document without touching the keyboard, then pull a colleague in with one link.
The design target is a specific desk: documents on the main monitor, Handboard full screen on the other, hands up in front of the webcam. Every product decision traces back to it.
System design notes
Six gestures. The whole loop.
Every gesture is position-based: no swipes, no flicks, nothing that depends on speed. At 30 frames a second, those misfire. Pick a gesture to watch it drive the board, take over with your mouse, or switch on your camera and use your own hand.
A complete whiteboard, sized for a hand.
Handboard ships the toolset people expect from a modern whiteboard, and every control a hand can press is big enough to hit from across the room. Each tile below is live.
Draw anything a meeting needs
Pen, highlighter, eraser, ten shapes, arrows that stick, text, sticky notes, laser pointer and images.
12 colours, a custom picker, fill, size, dash, opacity, text position
Move a box, its arrows follow
80 px buttons that pull your cursor in
Laser pointer, full screen, light and midnight
From the board into your doc in one pinch
⌘C or a pinch on Copy puts the selection on your clipboard as a PNG. Paste images, text and shapes in; drag images straight onto the board.
Undo only touches your own work
Hover the bars: your undo skips everyone else's strokes.
Every gesture has a mouse and keyboard twin
Familiar whiteboard shortcuts, trackpad pinch and scroll, space-drag to pan, zoom 5% to 800%, labels on shapes, z-order, duplicate, nudge.
Share a link. That's the onboarding.
No logins, ever. Pick a name; it stays in your browser. Boards are public links, and the link is the key.
See each other think. Live cursors, names and hand pinches. Strokes stream to everyone while they're being drawn.
Follow someone's view. Click an avatar and your camera rides along with theirs.
Edits merge shape by shape, and undo never erases what other people drew in between.
Private by architecture, not by policy.
Hand tracking runs in the browser. Camera frames become 21 points per hand on your machine, and only the shapes you draw go to the cloud. Drag the diagram to look around.
Copy works even when the board isn't focused
Browsers only let the focused window write to the clipboard. On a two-monitor desk, your document has focus, so Handboard copies in three tiers. Flip the switches:
The board has focus, so the PNG goes on the system clipboard right away.
A zero-dependency Node script on 127.0.0.1 writes the PNG to the OS clipboard. It accepts Handboard origins only.
The copy waits and lands the moment you click the board. A toast says so.
Boards can't be enumerated. The unguessable link is the only capability.
App Check (invisible reCAPTCHA) rejects requests that don't come from the site, and the rules check schema and size on every write.
Cursors live in the Realtime Database and are removed the moment you disconnect.
Anyone with a link can edit or clear that board, so share links with people you trust and keep secrets off boards.
Small, fast and tested.
Vanilla TypeScript, a Canvas 2D renderer and no UI framework. Tests run on every change, and gesture tests replay synthetic hands, so they need no webcam.
Mouse and hands both become down, move, up and tap on the same controller. Tools never know which one you used.
Hand tracking comes from a gesture engine shared with a sibling project, and a check fails the build if the copies drift. Tuning goes through live options.
One document per shape, so concurrent edits merge. Strokes stream to peers while they're drawn; cursors go about 14 times a second.
A dirty flag plus requestAnimationFrame, with viewport culling. The board draws only when something changed, and only what you can see.
The hands-on feel of a smartboard, on the webcam you already own.
Engineers, writers and PMs who think in diagrams while they write.
Standing back from the screen, laser in hand, zooming with two hands.
Workshops and retros where half the room has never used the tool.
People who'd rather point than drag: a second input path alongside mouse and keyboard.
Shipped and live. What's next is up to you.
Six position-based gestures, with Relaxed and Precise pinch. Tracking runs in the browser.
Ten shapes, pen, highlighter, eraser, text, sticky notes, laser, and arrows that stick.
Bold, italic, strikethrough, bullets and numbered lists, any size, any palette colour, placed anywhere in a shape or sticky note.
A 12-colour palette, a picker for any other, fill, size, dash and opacity.
Share a link. Live cursors and pinches, follow someone's view, undo only your own work.
Copy as PNG with a pinch, export PNG, SVG or a board file, and a clipboard bridge for two monitors.
App Check keeps scripts out of the databases, and your camera video never leaves your device.
Every gesture has a mouse or keyboard twin, so it works without a webcam.
Tell me what to build next.
Which gesture misfired for you? What would make this your go-to board for a meeting? Every reply shapes what comes next.
Raise your hand. Start drawing.
Open Handboard, click New board, share the link, and turn on your camera. Best in Chrome or Edge on a laptop with a webcam; the mouse works everywhere.