A shared sticky-note wall that syncs across your devices in about a second. No accounts, no app store, and no requirement that your hardware was made this decade.
Windows, macOS, Linux. Your notes never leave your network.
The outlined box is someone else, showing where they are on the wall right now.
What died was software support — and then every whiteboard tool decided it needed a GPU. Miro, Excalidraw and tldraw all render to a canvas, which is precisely what a 2012 tablet cannot do. Attic is built the other way round.
Notes are plain HTML elements and zoom is a CSS transform. You get the infinite-canvas feel without the hardware bill.
Sync is ordinary HTTP polling. It survives flaky wifi, sleeping tablets and captive portals far better — and works in browsers older than WebSocket itself.
An e-ink mode for Boox, Kindle and reMarkable: maximum contrast, borders instead of fills, colour re-encoded as texture, and slower polling so the panel stops refreshing under you.
For hardware older than the idea of a web app, the whole wall renders server-side as plain HTML with a form. It is not pretty. It works.
Rooms live at their own address — /kitchen, /sprint — and are created by being opened. Switch a room between layouts whenever the work changes shape; nothing is lost either way.
Notes anywhere. Drag, resize, connect them with lines. Pan and zoom the board.
A real kanban: a card belongs to a column, and dropping it elsewhere moves it. To do / Doing / Done, retro, or a column per weekday.
For a wall-mounted tablet: chrome hidden, dragging off so nobody rearranges the board by brushing past it.
Add /view to any room to share it with nothing to press — auto-fitted, with a greyscale switch for projectors.
Including the limit we cannot engineer around.
| Device | Attic | Miro | Excalidraw |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current laptop or phone | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| iPad 2 / 3 (iOS 9) | Yes | No | No |
| Android 5–7 tablet | Yes | No | No |
| E-ink reader (Boox, Kindle) | Yes | No | No |
| Pre-2008 machine, on your LAN | Basic mode | No | No |
| Pre-2008 machine, over the internet | No | No | No |
No account to create, nothing to configure.
Download the app and open it, or run node server.js on a Pi or NAS. No dependencies, no build step.
The app shows a QR for your machine's address. Scan it with the old tablet — there is nothing to install on it.
It appears on every other device in about a second. Prop the tablet on a shelf and leave it there.
Self-hosting is the product, it is free, and it stays free. Hosting is the part that costs money to run, so hosting is the part that will cost money.
node server.js — that is allAttic is free and there is nothing to upgrade to. If it saved you buying a tablet, buy us a coffee — entirely optional, and it changes nothing about what you get.