So many of us are working from home now; COVID19 has changed the way we work in a very rapid way and Work From Home has become a common fact for many of us. Personally I have been working from home almost since the start of my career , way back. Reason was simple, we had a home office and were a family business. One thing that has always made me want to go to a customer or talk with a team is to have the ability to whiteboard a design or solution to a problem.
And that is something which is in my opinion very difficult with Webex and Zoom. Sure, there are corporate solutions around, like Desk pro, Webex Board, etc. And I will be honest, they look great. But they just don’t work in a smaller work from home environment/situation.
And until recently I just accepted the fact that Whiteboarding from Home as a feature wasn’t going to happen soon, and just had to accept it. Well, until I asked around and my fellow Cisco Champion Matt Ouellette shared his solution with me. The solution is based on the Apple ecosystem and what you need are:
- MacBook Pro with latest MacOS
- iPad that supports an Apple Pencil
- Apple Pencil
- Your favorite drawing app on you iPad (I am using Paper, but you could use any tool, like MS OneNote)
And here’s how to do it:
- First connect (physically) your iPad to your Mac and trust the computer
- Now that the Mac is trusted, your iPad screen has become a media source within Quicktime, so launch Quicktime Player.
- Click File -> New Movie Recording and click on the small triangle just right next to the record button
- Select your iPad as source
- Now go to your favorite video conferincing tool and share your desktop or juist quicktime player
- Go back to the iPad, start your favorite drawing App and start drawing
Agreed, it is not a collaborative way of Whiteboarding, that someone in the meeting can co-whiteboard with me, but it allows me to draw designs and solutions based on what we are talking about like I am standing in front a virtual whiteboard . What I like is that you don’t even need to record it, you can just show it. Save the diagrams for after the meeting and you have great sketches to start writing documentation with.
I am really happy with this, because it allows me to create videos and explain while drawing in the courses that I am preparing too, so thanks Matt for the tip. I have been using this a few times already over the past days!