Paper sketches are best for understanding and communicating with others. There are still some problems with paper sketches especially from search perspective.

Paper sketches get lost easily. This is due that paper sketches are thrown away and to support creative thinking. Most of the time it is even good thing that those get lost. On the other hand, sometimes you want to find your old creative ideas. E.g. you might create ideas before you actually work with the idea. Then you just sketch ideas when those pop up in your mind. In this case you want to find your ideas later.

It’s hard to reuse paper sketches. While paper sketches are not intended to be reused, you might want to reuse thought process or get ideas from a sketch to create ideas in an other. Then you need to find sketches to copy ideas. That is difficult with paper sketches.

Digital sketch tools are still clumsier than paper and pen sketches, but they do have many benefits over paper sketches, especially if you think about search. Digitalized sketch tools help you to find sketches that you made earlier. It’s also possible to collaborate with others in real time and share your ideas easily. Digital sketch tools let you reuse ideas, you can copy paste content. You can fine tune the idea and even create maintainable documentation from part of the sketch content.

Sketchboard.io Search Features

Searching is important and Sketchboard used to lack on this front, but now this is changed. Now all board content is searchable. You can search boards by board name or search by board content. Search result shows board visually, so it is easier to find what you are looking for.

“Search” Sketches Visually

Now Sketchboard generates preview thumbnail for your boards. As one user told me,

The random identifiers makes it very difficult to remember which board is what if you forget to name the board.

Many times just the visuals of the board brings to your mind, hey this was the board I was looking for. That is the power of visual notes and sketches. Layout of the elements and how those are emphasized are important. Structure and thoughts flow back in to your mind.

Visual index of boards lets you change boards very quickly, especially if you use a shortcut. Click “Switch Board” and by default boards are listed in grid format. Sketchboard creates thumbnail for your business boards.

The Search Box

When you start to type search query in the search box, you’ll see boards that have name close to what you have typed. Sketchboard uses so called fuzzy search logic to find board names. In case you want to find terms from board content click “search Sketchboard” or just press enter. Then search finds exact word matches from your board content.

Sketchboard searches business boards where you are the owner or belong to the team that shared the board. Note, you cannot search boards that are shared to you with a password.

New Shortcut

Mac OS X: Cmd + P
Windows/Linux: Ctrl + P

Shortcut is inspired by Sublime Text editor and it overrides default browser print functionality.

If you’d like chat, contact me.