3 min read
A whiteboard that starts with a sticky note
Most online whiteboards begin the same way: an email, a password, a team name, an invitation to bring your team. All of that makes sense for a company tool. It makes much less sense when you just want to lay out a retro, sort a backlog or sketch how a process works before a call in ten minutes. So nopa’s board starts with the board.
You open it, and it is already saving
There is no account to create. You add a sticky, and a moment later the board is saved — not to our server, to your browser’s own storage on this device. Close the tab, come back tomorrow, and it is where you left it. You can keep several boards side by side, one per project or one per meeting.
That is the whole trick, and it has a price we would rather name up front: the board lives in this browser. Clear the site’s data and it goes with it. Export it as a file every now and then if it matters — more on that below.
A blank board is the hardest part
Staring at an empty canvas is where most whiteboard sessions stall, so the board comes with eleven templates you can start from in one click:
- Retro, kanban, backlog and roadmap — for the planning half of the week.
- SWOT, mind map and org chart — for the thinking half.
- A BPMN process and three UML diagrams (sequence, class, activity) — for when someone asks how the thing actually works.
Thirty comments, one paste
The feature we use most is the least glamorous one. Paste a list — or a whole column copied from a spreadsheet — and every line becomes its own sticky. A retro whose comments arrived in a chat lands on the board in one go instead of thirty clicks, and then you sort them by dragging.
Arrows behave the same way you would hope: drag from one shape to another and the ends attach to the edges, the label sits on the line, and everything follows when you move a shape. Guides appear while you drag, so a diagram can look tidy without a ruler.
Showing it to people
Group parts of the board into sections and the board turns into a presentation: it walks through the sections one at a time, in order, so you can talk through a plan without zooming around by hand.
To send it, export a PNG, a PDF or an SVG — or press Ctrl/⌘+Shift+C and paste the whole board straight into a chat as a picture. There is also a JSON export: hand that file to a colleague and they import it into their own board and carry on from where you stopped.
What we left out on purpose
There is no real-time co-editing, no comments, no cursors of other people moving around. Those need accounts and a server in the middle of every keystroke, and tools like Miro and FigJam do that well. If your team draws on one board at the same moment, use one of them.
Ours is for one person thinking: the retro you prepare before the meeting, the plan for a move, the diagram you need to understand before you explain it. For that, a board that opens instantly and asks nothing is the better tool — and the one we wanted ourselves.