Online whiteboard, no account, nothing uploaded

Draw on the board above. There is nothing to sign up for, no workspace to join and no board link to generate. What you draw is written to your own browser and goes nowhere else — not because of a privacy policy you would have to take on trust, but because this page is not permitted to open a network connection at all.

What “local-first” means here

Most online whiteboards are a window onto a server. You sign in, the board lives in someone's database, and the drawing you see is a copy streamed back to you. That design buys real things — collaboration, sync between your devices, a board that survives a lost laptop — and it costs one: every stroke you make is uploaded, because that is how the product works.

Local-first inverts it. The whiteboard is the page you already downloaded. Your boards are stored in your browser's own database, the drawing happens on your device's canvas, and there is no account because there is nothing to attach an account to. The page ships with a Content-Security-Policy that setsconnect-src 'none', which is a rule the browser enforces: no fetch, no XHR, no WebSocket, no beacon. Even a build that tried to send your board somewhere would simply fail to send it.

That is a narrower promise than “we respect your privacy”, and narrow is the point. Cloudflare serves this page, so like any web host it sees your IP address and the fact that you asked for this URL. What nobody sees is what you drew, because your drawing never becomes a request in the first place.

When you would actually reach for it

The honest answer is: whenever the drawing is for you, and the round trip through an account would cost more than it returns. Concretely —

• You are on a call and need to see the shape of a problem. Boxes, arrows, a circle round the part that is wrong. Nobody else needs to open it.
• You are planning a system before writing any of it: a rectangle per service, arrows for what calls what, and a second board for the version you abandoned an hour later.
• You are explaining something while screen-sharing, and you want to draw while you talk rather than build a diagram in advance.
• The content is something you would rather not put on a stranger's server: an architecture with real hostnames, a floor plan, an org chart with real names, a layout for a product that has not been announced.
• You have a tablet and a stylus and want a scratch surface that opens in a second — no app install, no first-run tour, no “choose a plan”.

Check the claim yourself, in about a minute

Everything above is easy to write and impossible to distinguish from a lie by looking at the page. So check it. You already have the tools.

1. Press F12, or Cmd+Option+I on a Mac, and open the Network tab.
2. Reload, then clear the list so you are starting from empty.
3. Draw a few strokes. Add a rectangle and an arrow. Open a second board with the “+”, switch back, close one.

The list stays empty. Not “only anonymous telemetry” — empty. Then read the policy the server actually sent, which is the check that does not depend on the page behaving today:

curl -sI https://board.jamuny.com/ | grep -i content-security-policy

The third check is the one that needs no tools at all: load the board, turn your Wi-Fi off, and carry on drawing. Everything keeps working, because none of it needed the network. Software that phones home stops working when it cannot. Jamuny's verify page walks through the same checks across every property on the network, and states plainly what is not being claimed.

Boards are tabs, and they live in this browser

The strip at the top of the window is a tab per board. “+” starts a new one, “×” closes one, and double-clicking a tab's name renames it — the same rename is in the menu button at the left of the toolbar, since a double-click is not something a page can hint at. New boards are called Untitled until you say otherwise, and tabs keep the order you created them in rather than jumping around as you edit.

Everything is saved as you go, about half a second after you stop, and a finished stroke is written out within a second of drawing it. Boards are kept in IndexedDB under a database called jamuny-board, which means: this browser, this device, this profile. They will not be on your phone. They will not be in your other browser. And clearing site data for this domain deletes them permanently, with no copy anywhere for anyone to restore. That is the real cost of the trade, and it is worth knowing before you draw something you need next month.

If your browser blocks storage — a private window with strict settings, for example — the board still works, and a banner says outright that nothing will survive a reload rather than letting you find out later. Two tabs of the same browser share one board list, so a board created in one appears in the other's strip.

What this whiteboard deliberately does not do

There is no real-time collaboration. Not “not yet” — this is a position. Two cursors on one board requires a server that holds the board while both people edit it, and that server is exactly the thing whose absence the rest of this page is about. You cannot have a board nobody can upload and a board two people can share at once. This one picked the first. If you need the second, use a tool built around a server, and choose it knowing that is what you are choosing.

Syncing your own boards between your own devices is ruled out by the same argument, for the same reason. So is any kind of account.

Two things are simply not built yet, and the toolbar says so rather than pretending: the text and image buttons are disabled and labelled as coming. Arrows are also straight arrows — drawing one from a rectangle does not attach it, so moving the rectangle later will not drag the arrow along.

The drawing tools that are there

Pen, rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow

Five drawing tools plus select, each with a single-letter shortcut:P pen, R rectangle, O ellipse, Lline, A arrow and V select. The pen is a freehand stroke that thins and thickens as you move rather than coming out as a uniform slab, which is the difference between a drawn line and an extruded one.

Clean or Sketch, chosen per element

Every shape can be drawn crisply or with a hand-drawn wobble, and the choice belongs to the element rather than to the board. A clean rectangle and a sketched one can sit side by side on the same board, and changing the setting later does not reach back and redraw everything you already made. Diagrams that need to look finished and diagrams that need to look provisional are different jobs, and a whiteboard should not force you to pick one for the whole file.

Stroke, fill and width

Seven stroke colours, five fills, four stroke widths, and solid, dashed or dotted lines. The panel applies to whatever is selected as well as to what you draw next — a style control that only changed future shapes would read as broken. The colours are deliberately not the interface's purple: they are content, and each was measured for contrast and for being distinguishable from the others at a glance.

Selecting, moving, undoing

With the select tool, click a shape, shift-click to add or remove one, or drag a marquee across several. Drag the selection to move it; with exactly one shape selected, drag a corner handle to resize it. Deleteremoves the selection, ] brings it to the front, [sends it to the back, and Escape deselects.Cmd/Ctrl+Z undoes and addingShift redoes, up to 200 steps — kept per board, so undo on one board can never reach back into the board you were looking at before.

Moving around the canvas

The canvas is infinite in every direction. Scroll or two-finger swipe to pan, hold Cmd/Ctrl while scrolling to zoom towards the pointer, or hold Space and drag — the middle mouse button does the same. The percentage at the right of the toolbar tells you where you are, and the position and zoom are saved with the board, so reopening it puts you back where you left off rather than at the origin.

Questions