14 DAY TRIAL // If you often make presentations, you know that no two presentations are the same. Sometimes you need to insist on a certain aspect that was quickly covered another time. Sure, you could custom tailor the presentation so that you have a slightly different one for each audience or meeting you have, but not only is this time consuming, it also requires a certain amount of prior knowledge you might not have. Some make good use of laser pointers to draw attention to certain details, but these pointers are very small, and almost always colored red, meaning that if your audience loses track of the pointer at some point, or you need to work with some form of red, you are pretty much stuck. In comes Scriboard, a tiny utility that lets you draw on the screen.
What is it good for Scriboard practically adds a new, transparent layer over whatever it was you were doing on you computer, and lets you draw stuff on this layer. It is similar to taking a screenshot of whatever you were doing, loading it up in an image editing program and drawing on it... The only difference is that here you do it on the fly.
This makes Scriboard ideal for use during presentations, to attract the attention of viewers to certain things, by circling, underlining or coloring. It even features the option to automatically add an arrow at the end of any line if you keep a key pressed. And once you have their attention drawn, you can easily discard all the scribbles you have made and continue with your presentation.
Not only hand waving Beside being a great way to direct the attention of a live audience, Scriboard can also be used as an impromptu tool, to quickly create visual aid for your speech. Use it to quickly draw diagrams and sketch things out, and modify it as you progress.
If you don't find yourself facing a live audience very often, you can still use it to highlight and draw attention to certain things without having to use a graphics editor, and having the advantage of a dynamic background to doodle on.
Tools of the trade Scriboard offers several tools you can use to scribble with: Free Line, Straight Line, Rectangle, Ellipse and Rounded Rectangle. For both types of lines you can opt to keep the Option key pressed before releasing the mouse in order to get an arrow added automatically. The arrow always points in the right direction and only looks bad if instead of a line you draw something that is almost a dot. The shape tools work in either corner to corner or center to edge drag mode, behavior that can be chosen from the preferences and temporarily inverted using the Option key.
All of these tools can be used with one of four customizable markers. Each marker's color can be set in the preferences, and for each, the thickness and opacity can be adjusted on the fly, either through the sliders or through hotkeys.
Scriboard also has a text tool that can be used to add labels and the sort. The look of these can only be changed in the Preferences, so they will all look the same, but they are easy to create, edit and move about. Using a combination of text boxes and straight lines you can create diagrams and flowcharts easy.
Anything else? You can configure the behavior of the application using several hot keys and you can save and restore scribbles on the fly or even as files for opening up in another application.
The only real limitation of Scriboard is that it does not have an erase tool. This makes things very complicated if you do something wrong. It does offer an unlimited of undo and redo commands but there are instances where the lack of an eraser is sorely felt.
The Good A very easy to use tool for drawing things on screen. It is very customizable and even though it is very discreet, it can even be controlled without the palette through the use of hot keys.
The Bad There is no erase tool in a paint program. While in a normal paint program you can overcome this by painting with the background color, the background here is transparent so that is not really an option.
The Truth A great way to liven up those live visual presentations and use as visual aid during impromptus, just make sure you remember undo is your only choice if something goes bad.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
