There is a routine that can eat an hour of a design week and never appears on a timesheet. You export a screenshot, draw a red circle on it and email it with a paragraph explaining which button you mean. The client replies about a different button, and you export again. Nobody is confused about the work. What confuses everyone is the picture, which went out of date the moment it left the tool.
Every TimerOS project now has a canvas instead. Your team and the client draw on the same one at the same time, from the desktop app, the web app or the client’s own portal. When a sketch is ready for sign-off, you save it as a fixed revision and send it to the client to approve or reject.
Why a shared canvas and not a comment thread
Written feedback on visual work means translating twice, and badly. The client turns a picture into a sentence, you turn the sentence back into a picture, and every mismatch costs another round of changes. “Make the header bigger” has at least four meanings, and you will often pick the wrong one.
Pointing is faster than describing, and a comment thread cannot point.
The tools are deliberately simple: freehand, rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow, text, sticky notes and an eraser. The board stands in for the whiteboard on the meeting-room wall, in the office the client no longer visits.
Live, without assuming the network is reliable
Every shared tool has to decide what happens when the connection drops in the middle of a stroke. The usual choice is to deliver everything reliably. That gives a moving cursor the same care as a saved document, and boards built that way feel sluggish.
So the board sorts its traffic into two lanes by what losing it would cost, and each lane has its own rules.
Both lanes are also throttled, so a busy board cannot overload itself. While you draw freehand, the stroke in progress goes out about thirty times a second. Every finished stroke is saved to the database, but in batches, because one request per stroke would hit the API’s own rate limit at normal drawing speed. Lane A has a fixed ceiling and deliberately drops anything above it.
A revision is a promise about what was approved
A live board is a poor thing to approve. If a client says “yes, that” on Tuesday and the board has changed by Thursday, nobody can say afterwards what “that” was. Approval needs something that cannot change.
Saving a revision makes a fixed copy of everything on the board at that moment. It starts as a private draft for your team. The client sees none of it, not even its title or internal note. Only when you send it for approval does it appear in the client’s portal, where they approve or reject it and can add a note either way.
Restore, and why everyone sees it
Restoring a saved revision returns the live board to that revision at once, for everyone currently on it. An early build did not: it restored the board only for the person who clicked, and everyone else kept drawing on the old canvas. That is the worst failure a shared board can have, because two people believe they are looking at the same thing when they are not.
Who can see it, and who can draw
The board follows the project’s own boundaries and adds none of its own.
The limits
- Clients see your pictures but cannot add their own. Since v1.18.3 you can paste, drag or choose a picture for the board: PNG, JPEG, GIF or WebP, up to ten megabytes each and a hundred per board. SVG is excluded because it can contain scripts. Before you put a screenshot on a board a client can open, remember that they will see everything on it.
- It is not a design tool. There are no layers, components or precise typography. For those, stay in your design tool and use the board to point at the result.
- Boards are bounded. Five thousand elements per board, two hundred saved revisions, and a thousand points in any one freehand stroke. These are hard limits, and more than enough for the job.
- Drawing together needs a live connection. The board still loads and can be viewed on a poor connection, but if the live link drops, you see your own strokes and not your colleague’s until it comes back.
Where it changes the week
Drawing together is pleasant, but the bigger gain is the routine it replaces, which was unbilled and invisible. Exporting, annotating and explaining is real work that clients are rarely invoiced for, and at the time it never looks like a problem. It shows up later, as projects that quietly ran over and an effective hourly rate lower than you expected.
The board also removes one more reason for a client to email you asking what is going on. It sits in the same project where the client already follows status, files and approvals, so they can check for themselves where you got to, without waiting for an email from you.