I have for many years searched high and low for an electronic whiteboard app. It's one of those Great Ideas that many have had, but every implementation I've ever tried has been terrible (slow, clumsy, feature poor — usually all three). It never seemed like that difficult a thing to create, but I've never used one more than once.

Until now.

Patrick K. over at the Z-Axis tipped me off to skrbl — the first fast, usable, feature-rich whiteboard app I've ever seen. Patrick has a gushing review that summarizes both my feelings about past attempts at whiteboard nirvana and my elation at the joys of using skrbl.

Of course, I still can't draw . . .

Slashdot reports this morning that PDF is being submitted as an ISO standard. Of course, PDF is a de facto open standard — I have literally dozens of open source implementations of PDF tools (including such amazing apps as pdftk, without which my life would be meaningless), and none of them would have been possible without the open format.

But having PDF be a de jure standard is very good news, as far as I'm concerned. I love PDF, because my favorite way to create documents is to typeset them lovingly in LaTeX, export to Postscript, and then export to PDF (I have not willingly used a word processor in over ten years).

If PDF is approved as an ISO standard, it will mean that the standards zealots among my circle of friends (yes, these are the kinds of friends I have) might back off and not insist that absolutely everything be in XML.

I'm not knocking XML, mind you. I drank the Kool-Aid on that one years ago. But when it comes to creating beautiful documents for people to read, LaTeX/Postscript/PDF is hard to beat.