White-Spaces

This is the free and open source version of White-Spaces, a web based, real time, collaborative whiteboard application with rich media support. White-Spaces is a fork of Spacedeck Open. Spacedeck was developed in 6 major releases during Autumn 2011 until the end of 2016 and was originally a commercial SaaS. The developers were Lukas F. Hartmann (mntmn) and Martin Güther (magegu).

Demo

A public demo of the latest White Spaces version is available. Note that accounts and data on the demo server are deleted periodically (typically every 24 hours).

Features

• Create virtual whiteboards called Spaces with virtually unlimited size
• Drag & drop images, videos and audio from your computer or the web
• Write and format text with full control over fonts, colors and style
• Draw, annotate and highlight with included graphical shapes
• Turn your Space into a zooming presentation
• Collaborate in realtime with teammates, students or friends
• Share Spaces on the web or via email
• Export your work as printable PDF or ZIP (currently being fixed, stay tuned)

Use Cases

• Education: Virtual classwork with multimedia
• Creative: Mood boards, Brainstorming, Design Thinking
• Visual note taking and planning

Requirements, Installation

White-Spaces requires:

• Node.js v14: Web Server / API. Download: https://nodejs.org
• Graphicsmagick. On non-Linux, Download: http://www.graphicsmagick.org/ On Linux, install via package manager.
• Optionally ffmpeg, audiowaveform and ghostscript. See "Optional Dependencies" below.

To run White-Spaces, you only need Node.JS 14.x.

To install all node dependencies, run (do this once):

npm install

Configuration

See config/default.json. Set storage_local_path for a local sqlite database or storage_region, storage_bucket, storage_cdn and storage_endpoint for AWS S3. mail_provider may be one of console or smtp. Also, omit a trailing / for the endpoint.

Run (web server)

node white_spaces.js

Then open http://localhost:9666 in a web browser.

Optional Dependencies

For advanced media conversion:

• ffmpeg and ffprobe for video/audio conversion. Download: https://www.ffmpeg.org/download.html
• audiowaveform for audio waveform rendering. Download: https://github.com/bbcrd/audiowaveform
• ghostscript for PDF import. Download: https://www.ghostscript.com/download/gsdnld.html

Data Storage

By default, media files are uploaded to the storage folder. The database is stored in database.sqlite by default.

Run with Docker

• configure config/default.json
• configure volumes section inside docker-compose.yml
  • point to database.sqlite on the host system
  • touch database.sqlite if it not exists
  • point to storage/ on the host system
  • mkdir storage/ if it not exists
• start the container with sudo docker-compose up -f docker-compose.yml -d --build

Hacking & Theming

To rebuild the frontend CSS styles:

gulp styles

All relevant files are located in ./styles.

To substitute your logo for the default design, edit all relevant image files in ./public/images.

Community and Supporters

White Spaces is a Spacedeck fork collaboratively undertaken by Mishkin Berteig and Tekhnee.

     

We are grateful to fosshost.org for generously providing the high-quality virtual private server which hosts the White Spaces demo. Fosshost is "a not-for-profit provider of free-to-use and accessible cloud-hosting services to the free and open source software community."

License

White-Spaces logo and brand are trademarks of Mishkin Berteig. Some rights reserved.

The Spacedeck logo and brand assets are registered trademarks of Spacedeck GmbH. All rights reserved.

White-Spaces source code is released under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 (GNU AGPLv3).

White-Spaces (changes to Spacedeck Open)
Copyright (C) 2020 Mishkin Berteig
Copyright (C) 2020 Tekhnee

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

White-Spaces is based on Spacedeck Open source code which is released under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 (GNU AGPLv3).

Spacedeck Open - Web-based Collaborative Whiteboard For Rich Media
Copyright (C) 2011-2018 Lukas F. Hartmann, Martin Güther
Icons and original CSS design copyright by Thomas Helbig

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.