Layered Drawing and Display Tool

Tomasz Major

TANGO Interactive shared object oriented drawing tool, Wbd, provides functionality similar to the one of Microsoft PowerPoint, although its focus is shifted toward drawing rather than preparing presentations. It offers all of the standard drawing tools available in commercial applications: rectangles, ovals, polygons, arrows, free-forms, text, etc.

New, custom-made objects can be imported and become fully functional components inside the whiteboard. Objects may be just shapes but also active components (e.g. video player) performing complicated operations while wbd is in the play mode.

Wbd content sharing via TANGO Interactive is based on the master-master relationship, which means that every participant has equal rights to perform editing. In other words, unlike many other products, our whiteboard supports concurrent drawing. Changes of the state of every object are reflected in other participants' whiteboards immediately, with few exceptions, such as resizing, moving or changing some object's properties. In these cases, updates are broadcast as soon as the modifying action terminates.

Wbd works as a standalone Java application, as an applet embedded in the Web page, or collaboratively within the TANGO Interactive framework.

General remarks

Selecting existing object

Moving and resizing selected object

Object creation and deletion

Structural operations in container

Editing selected object

Editing container

Importing and exporting objects

Sending updates in Tango

Appendix A: Most important key combinations and shortcuts

Tabtransfer focus to the next object (toward the top layer)
ShiftTabtransfer focus to the previous object
Spaceenter editing mode (one object must be selected)
ShiftSpacequit editing mode
CtrlSpaceshow property editor (one object must be selected)
Deletedelete selected object

Appendix B: Known limitations


TANGO Interactive support group
Last modified: Wed Feb 23 10:38:46 EST 2000