This feels like Apple decided iPad needed a “killer app” and worked backwards from there to actually make the app. Notice the iPad is in the center of the picture at the top of the announcement, and Apple Pencil (iPad accessory) is called out as working especially well with this.
My personal opinion is this is unlikely to work and that the reason iPad lacks a “killer app” is largely because the app ecosystem is too dysfunctional for one to emerge organically from third party ecosystems. Because the iPad is a more powerful platform than iPhone, and (especially) because people’s “session times” tend to be longer on iPad vs iPhone, you need to invest more to make a good iPad app. On the iPhone it’s enough to save people a little time vs the web and connect them more readily to a service while mobile (Uber, Instagram, Amazon, etc)
iPad offers the chance to do something much deeper. But there is so much more risk — will people pay higher prices (App Store price expectations are lower than desktop), will Apple approve the app, will it get noticed in the store amid all the crap. Are the APIs powerful enough to make what you want to make. Etc.
Procreate is on everyone's iPad I know. I kinda blows my mind how affordable that app is. People would definitely pay 2-3x more or a yearly sub for it.
Using the Apple Pencil with either app gives me the benefits of analogue work and the benefits of digital work. Handwriting helps me remember things, but since the product is digital, it's trivial to move/undo/etc.
And Procreate + Apple Pencil is way better than any other art solution I've found for digital art. Granted I've never tried a drawing tablet with a screen, but an extremely cheap option is still $200. For one that works as well as the AP + iPad you'd probably be looking at near the same price point.
For me, it's Shapr3D. It has the most intuitive CAD interface I've ever used and it's all based around the pencil. Pretty killer app, especially if you have a 3D printer.
I'm an hobby artist and have played with various drawing programs on the ipad (and gone through a few mid-level wacom tablets before that) and Procreate is simply amazing. It's an app that couldn't exist without the ipad and it massively increases its usefulness. Procreate is good enough that I don't feel the need to bring any further art supplies (even a sketchbook and pencils) when traveling.
For anyone who makes art, absolutely. I even use Procreate for brainstorming sometimes, because it's so much faster and more intuitive than any other app I've used.
Another thing that IMO is way better on iPad/Pencil is PDF editing and annotation. I happily pay for a subscription to PDF Expert[0] and I just use it for school.
I don’t really draw so I haven’t used it as much as I wanted to but that was one purchase that I never regretted. Also helps that it’s not subscription type. To this day anytime someone gets an iPad, I make them try the app.
And given that it was a non-pricy one-time purchase, and not a subscription, why would they regret it? The cost per hour of usage is only going to keep decreasing over time for them, as long as they keep using it in some capacity occasionally.
Because I was using it to practice making digital art which I just don’t have time for right now. I use it to make Christmas cards and doodle probably 5x in a year.
I don’t regret it because I can see that what I paid for is worth the value of the app despite not using it as much.
It's like $5. Even if you don't use it, you can tell it's a great app, updated often for free, etc. I've regretted apps I've paid $5 and $10 for and were crap, or baited me and turned to subscriptions etc. Procreate is not that.
And they added an incredibly dumb limitation: You cannot use any pen tablet (e.g. a wacom tablet) on Freeform for OS X. Drawing with a pen is only supported on iOS.
Yep, this has kept me from recommending Freeform. Popped it open when it appeared, broke out my tablet, realized it was useless, reopened Notability.app.
You can’t do any “freeform” drawing on Freeform on Mac OS. You can only use the pen tool for vector lines and splines. There is no pencil/marker tool.
I understand that a mouse or trackpad are not the best tools for drawing but many of us have used them for that since the original MacPaint app in 1984. Why remove this feature from the Mac version? Let alone for someone with a pen-based tablet.
I won't argue whether it this app should allow drawing from a pen tablet, but there are exactly none of you left. (I have owned three pen tablets in my life).
If it's free-from-Apple, the software is there to drive or enhance hardware sales.
You're just hugely mistaken. iPad has several killer apps, but the one that is probably the most important is Safari, followed by Mail, followed by Maps (and Google Earth), followed by a combination of Camera and Photos, followed by a tossup between Contacts and Calendar, then Books, Reminders, etc. That these applications are not original doesn't matter. The tablet form-factor and iPadOS platform makes them all earth-shattering for anyone who has previously been tied to a desktop or laptop with a conventional OS. Prior to iPhone, it was as it is today in that most computer users were not power users. They used web, email, and consumed media. iPad does all that better than anything that came before. It's annoying for more complicated tasks, but it does web, personal email and displays media better really than anything else available.
>> iPad has several killer apps, but the one that is probably the most important is Safari, followed by Mail, followed by Maps (and Google Earth), followed by a combination of Camera and Photos, followed by a tossup between Contacts and Calendar, then Books, Reminders, etc. That these applications are not original doesn't matter. The tablet form-factor and iPadOS platform makes them all earth-shattering for anyone who has previously been tied to a desktop or laptop with a conventional OS.
None of those are killer apps.
A killer app is an application that is so unique and so useful that it sells the hardware:
Web browsers, mail clients, maps / navigation, camera software, photo software, contacts management, calendaring, ebooks, and todo list / reminders software are available on iOS, MacOS, Android phones and tablets, Windows desktops and tablets, and even Linux desktop environments.
Are you really saying that the iPadOS version of those applications is so superior to any of the other competitors that people buy iPads just to use the iPadOS versions?
I’d definitely agree with the parent comment that Safari is one of the iPads killer apps.
Safari on a 12.9” iPad is like having an ergonomic MacBook browser. It’s powerful enough to render almost everything the web has (save for chrome specific experiments).
But as mentioned above the killer application isn’t software, it’s the form factor. While I have a decent TV, most of the video content I watch is on my iPad. It’s just more convenient.
To add one more, iOS is powerful but simple enough that I’ve recommended an iPad to most older people I know. They can do almost everything they need on it, and neither of us have to worry about it getting into a bad state like a desktop PC can.
And for most of them, the main thing they use on it is the browser.
Before the iPad came out - when Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was talking about the "CrunchPad" - the dream app was a browser. People were talking about laying on the sofa reading the news, watching videos, checking emails - without the bulkiness of having to interact with a keyboard.
> Are you really saying that the iPadOS version of those applications is so superior to any of the other competitors that people buy iPads just to use the iPadOS versions?
It isn't just these applications providing all too common functionality, it is the application centric iPadOS that makes them more than the sum of their parts, also. Apple's implementation of iPadOS and their tablet implementations of these common applications cause each to rise to the level of killer app, and, definitely, beyond all doubt, massively drive sales of the hardware just to use those particular yet common apps in Apple's implementations of them on a tablet. There's no great reason Android on third-party tablet, or whatever is running on Amazon's tablets, can't achieve the same, but they simply haven't. Android more or less sucks. Apple sucks, but with iPadOS + tablet app implementations, much much less.
Those are ‘killer apps’ compared to the phone for instance.
I played a bit with an old chromebook we bought for our kid’s school a while ago, and the browsing experience is definitely better than on my iPad Pro. Having actual arbitrary window management, tabs don’t get lost between the instances, video can actually play in the background, extensions work. The list just goes on and on.
I still prefer the iPad for reading long form and comics, but as the Kindle app is crippled, the overall experience isn’t that far either.
Disagree. there are cases where safari on a Portable tablet is far better than Safari on a MacBook that I have to lung around. It just feels better walking around with a light weight but good size tablet for basic web browsing. The form factor of touch is superior for maps and mail
> ... because the app ecosystem is too dysfunctional
I suggest that it’s even deeper than that. By dragging the iPad kicking and screaming in to the “pro” demographic, Apple has killed the very thing that made it compelling for “killer apps” in the first place: it’s focus on your app.
“When you open an app it becomes [whatever that app tells it to]” - My very rough paraphrasing of Steve Jobs during the original iPad era
When was the last time you could use an iPad for a single task without having to be precious about multi-touch gestures, and without notifications interrupting you? What ‘killer app’ can serve the now-fragmented demographics while also competing with everything else trying to steal your attention while you’re using it?
Yeah it makes a great demo! But perhaps they also looked at the success of Miro & Figjam and realised a whiteboard is an essential part of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote suite?
Lots of devices do lots of things that the iPad does. But they all have screens that are too small, or keyboards, or other things that make them too thick.
ipadOS apps aren't as powerful as computer programs, but they're good enough. And when combined with the iPad's form factor and simplicity, there's a reason that — according to Wikipedia — Apple's sold a half-billion of them.
That's strange, the form factor is the worst part for me.
There is no comfortable position to use an iPad in. In bed you're craning your head over, or propping it on your raised thighs. The keyboard cases are flimsy or super heavy.
I love the user interface on the iPad, it looks the best of iPhone, iPad, and Mac. But a MacBook is so much more ergonomic than an iPad.. :(
This is true. One place where the iPad’s form factor beats a laptop’s is the kitchen counter. It takes up less space but still gives a decently sized screen. Another is when reading PDFs in vertical orientation. It is very close to the experience of reading a printed sheet of paper.
It is worth noting that Google [1] (since 2016), Microsoft [2] and Adobe [3] all have their own collaborative whiteboard app. Yet Miro is almost the only one everyone is talking about. Maybe because it is by far the first (17B valuation) of 3 unicorns in the space [4]. Or is it the other way around ?
I like the expression "never underestimate the power of the default app" (already used in this thread). Well this did not work for Google and Microsoft. So is this gonna work for apple ? I can't say cause I don't have any apple product to test...
Not sure what you mean. As far as I know both Google's and Microsoft's versions are used by Workspace and O365 corporate customers extensively.
They're not really meant to be standalone apps, but to be used during remote whiteboarding meetings.
If you're not in that corporate environment, you're not really the intended consumer, although some people find it's useful for home/family stuff.
So the idea that this hasn't worked for Google and Microsoft doesn't really hold water. Their apps seem to be successful as intended.
Basically at this point, a whiteboarding app has turned into a necessary part of any "office suite" that contains videoconferencing. Hence, Apple has added it to their own "suite".
Microsoft Whiteboard doesn't work for me. It is extremely slow on computers, which is frustrating, but the dealbreaker is that the iPhone version apparently isn't included with Office 365? Not sure why, but I couldn't get it to run.
Miro is simple to get started, can be used in every browser for free, and is really nice for collaborative brainstorming sessions.
It's really interesting that everyone's making infinite canvas apps these days.
I wish they would all have the same thing standard that FigJam has: that if you hit cmd/ctrl-Enter while typing in a sticky note or object, that the software will create a new one for you to the right or below the one you were editing and you can just keep typing.
If you're trying to use software like this for brainstorming or writing down suggestions from others live, it adds significant friction to have to take your hands off the keyboard and use the mouse to create a new sticky note.
Excalidraw is another really productive infinite-canvas app. It feels 10x more productive to draw diagrams using that (for me at least). I think the imperfection of the lines, text, boxes means that you aren't distracted by slight misalignments that are glaringly obvious in most drawing tools and that allows you to just go faster.
The freeform canvas was what made Microsoft Onenote seem so compelling to start with, at least potentially. They stuffed it up of course. But I was always surprised other apps didn't pick up that particular baton.
It's a great app for a 1.0 release and good enough for the majority of users. People laughed at Notes.app but underestimated the power of the default app. I haven't launched Evernote in a decade...
Notes is one of my favourite apps on iOS. I just realised recently I could drag-and-drop recordings from Voice Memos right inline into a note on iPad and it synced everywhere, with playback controls right under my text
It also looks nice, syncs and collaborates well. I have everything from my shopping lists, to scans of all my kids' artwork, to design documents for coding projects
I have to use OneNote at work and it is abysmal. It is plain how little care and love appears to go into that product
You’d hate the Tangerine (bank) website. Each letter typed does a round-trip to the server, and each text box gets progressively slower the more put in it.
(Not just trauma-dumping. Saying this here to say there might be a common tech problem that we can expose)
I haven’t seen any such sluggishness. The only area where OneNote (MacOS) is slow is in syncing to other devices where it can take a minute or two to bring changes to another device. I rarely switch devices within a session so that doesn’t bother me.
>Freeform is an all-new app available starting today, included in the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
>A Collaboration Space : Whether a user is working at a desk or on the go, Freeform is incredibly useful for standalone projects or when collaborating with others. With the ability to work with up to 100 collaborators in the same board, Freeform creates a shared space for creativity when working on group projects or even planning a vacation with friends. Freeform takes advantage of the new collaboration features in Messages,
This limits collaboration to those in the Apple ecosystem. But many people would want to collaborate with Android users.
As analogy, Apple has wall-garden Facetime and also Group Facetime video chat for iOS users but I've only seen non-family members set up Zoom because you need to invite both Android+Apple to the video conference.
And Apple Messages chat app can have group chats that include Android users because it has fallback to SMS.
Yes, that's the point. Apple ties you into its ecosystem by creating apps that only work on their platform and in this case pressuring your friends to also buy from them. This isn't anything new. This app isn't trivial to create so it has to be funded by them somehow. If another company created an app similar to this then they would follow probably a different pattern which would be to first release on iOS, pay for it by some subscription model and then eventually have an option on Android if the company doesn't get bought out by Apple / Android or get Sherlocked.
Advocates of Watson made by Karelia Software, LLC claim that Apple copied their product without permission, compensation, or attribution in producing Sherlock 3. Some disagree with this claim, stating that Sherlock 3 was the natural evolution of Sherlock 2, and that Watson was obviously meant to have some relation to Sherlock by its very name.
The phenomenon of Apple releasing a feature that supplants or obviates third-party software is so well known that being Sherlocked has become an accepted term used within the Mac and iOS developer community.
Usually something to do with running a tumblr full of Benedict Cumberbatch/Martin Freeman fanfic.
But in this case, it refers to the fact that there used to be a Mac app called Watson (made by Karelia Software) that let you search all your personal files. Then Apple added an OS feature called Sherlock that did the same thing and ripped the rug out from under the third party developer. (Sherlock has since been replaced by Spotlight in more recent MacOS versions)
By analogy, anyone making software in the Mac ecosystem (or any ecosystem really) risks being ‘Sherlocked’ by having their idea ripped off and turned into an OS feature.
Calling it ”sherlocked” is recency bias on our part. Apple learned it from Microsoft, who took a thing that happened from time to time and operationalized it into a full-blown business strategy.
One by one, Microsoft took aim at successful DOS and Windows applications, especially business applications, and displaced them. Lotus… WordPerfect… Everyone, really. Unless your app was for a niche too specialized to be worth the hassle, Microsoft wanted to use you for market research and then either buy you, buy your competitor, or clone you.
> Calling it ”sherlocked” is recency bias on our part.
It has been called “sherlocking” in the Mac sphere ever since the Sherlock 3 incident. Any bias is not on our part, as this was more than 20 years ago. Yes, some of us were there (I was, so maybe I share some responsibility), but the combination of the minuscule Mac market share at the time and its steady growth for the 2 following decades means that the people who were around at the time are a statistically insignificant fraction of us today.
It is not unique and in retrospect we can find many historical examples before that, but it was a particularly high-profile one, it made a lot of noise, and the name stuck. Also, most Mac users at this point avoided Windows (or eve worse, dog forbid, MS-DOS) like the plague so this would not have been in people’s minds.
When accused by Steve Jobs of ripping Apple’s technology and designs off, Bill Gates is said to have cooly replied:
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
I do not think you understand what "anti-competitive" means.
It is a key aspect of of business that manufacturers add features to their products that other makers do not have, or do not execute as well. To insist that one such maker share their feature with everyone else is bananas.
If you don't like Apple, great. Buy something else. But to then come back and whine that you can't use Apple services without using an Apple device is ASTONISHINGLY entitled. Apple is nowhere close to a monopoly. They are therefore free to establish whatever platform rules they like.
Don't like it? Use something else; we live in an age of wonders where there are several other platforms, and several other video-calling tools, available to chose from.
This logic suggests that any feature of any platform should be made open to all other platforms, even competitor platforms. That doesn't make any sense to me.
Creating a better mousetrap involves creating features on YOUR product that other makers don't have on THEIR product.
There are plenty of other video calling options.
In this particular case, sure, it's true that Facetime works far, far better than any other option I've seen. But a good chunk of that is doubtless due to the fact that Apple controls both hardware and software for Facetime. It's easier to establish a high quality experience if you have that control -- and much harder to ensure it when you don't.
> add features to their products that other makers do not have, or do not execute as well
Generically that's true. If we were talking about bananas and Apple's banana's were better than Google's or Facebook's then that's legitimate competition.
But not all features are the same. Some features have secondary effects. The secondary effect in some cases has a competitive overlay. Once somebody starts using Facetime they can't switch out of the Apple ecosystem easily any more. It becomes very hard because you have to convince all the people you normally talk to switch to different apps. So there's clearly a benefit to Apple beyond Facetime being a good application in its own right.
When Apple competes by making Facetime a good product and there is zero friction to choose a different one, and hence users are choose Facetime - that's competition. When Apple introduces friction that stops users choosing a different produce no matter whether it is better or not - that is anticompetitive.
You are correct that Apple benefits from owning the full stack and that allows them to create a "better" experience". However it magnifies the anticompetitive aspect because competitors can't achieve the same experience as Facetime, even if the want. Not because of how much they are willing to invest, how skilled they are etc. Purely because of arbitrary barriers preventing them because Apple maintains proprietary control of the technical means to achieve it.
>Generically that's true. If we were talking about bananas and Apple's banana's were better than Google's or Facebook's then that's legitimate competition.
That's exactly what's happening here.
People switch platforms all the time. I suspect it's more into iOS than out of it, and I think that's evidence of Apple being straight-up better.
There's nothing stopping Google from trying to build that same interconnected smooth experience. They certainly have the money and expertise. But nothing you've said provides any justification for forcing Apple to open their platform's features to all comers.
(And, again, Facetime is better not just because of the protocol or software or servers; it matters that Apple controls the hardware side of the equation, too. That wouldn't be true if they published a Facetime client for Android, or allowed others to do so. The whole notion is anathema to the way they've built their ecosystem -- not just from a biz POV, but also from a smoothness/polish POV.)
Reading from the page, I’m still not sure what Freeform does better than FigJam for instance. I also wouldn’t exchange Meet or Zoom for Facetime in a professional setting.
I’m not sure what work or collaboration app do you see from Apple that exceeds the popular third party ones.
I can tell you what the benefits are. Whether those benefits make it better than FigJam or whatever is a tradeoff evaluation for each person to make for their use case, it could be that FigJam is right for Alice while Freeform is right for Bob, meanwhile Charlene despises them both.
But there are Facetime users. Not you, and not me at work, but me at home for sure. And there are Apple ecosystem dwellers who use a lot of apps. And definitely Apple ecosystem users that store their data in iCloud.
What Freeform offers those people is a collaboration app (not web app) with the data in iCloud. That has some value for people who already have everything in iCloud.
One kind of person has their passwords in 1Password, their docs in the g-suite, their reminders in some other company’s cloud, &c. They’re happy mixing and matching apps and logins and cloud storage.
They don’t have a compelling need for Freeform.
But what if your passwords and TOTP authenticators are in iCloud via the keychain? What if your docs are in Keynote and Pages and Numbers, stored in iCloud as well? What if you like having Mac and iOs native apps?
Then you have a case for considering Freeform.
I don’t think Apple launched it to take over the collaboration market, but for folks already fully in the ecosystem, it offers benefits.
What the comment says is that the third-party app ecosystem on Android is shitty. Which is not the same thing as saying that Android itself is shitty, or that Google’s apps are shitty.
Just that for various reasons, statistically, 90% of third-party android apps are shitty. This is absolutely true, but then again, judging an ecosystem by 90% of its apps is probably not very helpful.
90% of everything is crud, as Phil Sturgeon remarked. App ecosystems have winner-take-all economics, so 90% of the apps are poorly funded things thrown into the world like notes in bottles thrown into the sea.
If we lower the barriers to entry, we necessarily get more crud. The big question for a user is not whether 70%, 80%, or 90% of the apps are crud, it’s whether there are enough good apps for each user to have a good experience, and whether those good apps are discoverable.
The open web has created a world where 99.9999999% of all web pages are shit. But we don’t care right now, because HN isn’t one of them, and making it open makes it easier for the HNs of the world to be created.
If there was a “web gatekeeper” charging “developer membership” subscriptions, there would have been fewer shitty web pages, but no HN or raganwald.com either.
—-
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to ask whether Apple’s ecosystem is also 90% crud. It could be the case, but if you find the apps you need and they’re excellent, how would you ever know what the other five million iOS fart generators and home-brew to-do list apps look like?
> What the comment says is that the third-party app ecosystem on Android is shitty. Which is not the same thing as saying that Android itself is shitty, or that Google’s apps are shitty.
Just that for various
A lot of Android (and iOS for that matter) first party apps are also shitty, so the provenance doesn't really matter.
> It could be the case, but if you find the apps you need and they’re excellent, how would you ever know what the other five million iOS fart generators and home-brew to-do list apps look like?
How is that any different compared to Android? I have found the apps that I need and are excellent, and I don't care about the rest.
I am in no way saying that the Apple ecosystem is superior to the Android ecosystem, or that Keynote is superior to Slides or PowerPoint, for that matter.
Just that all reasonably open ecosystems are full of crud, and while pointing out that any one ecosystem is full of crud is true, it is also not a particularly helpful.
The provenance of the Phil Sturgeon quote is helpful. He was praised for being an excellent author, and asked why he wrote SciFi, a genre in which 90% of the published works were crud.
His remark that “90% of everything is crud” illuminated a truth that people tend to associate the quality of a genre they like with the good works in that genre that they are familiar with, while associating the quality of a genre they don’t like with the mean or even worst works in that genre.
It absolutely is the same between Apple, Android, and Microsoft. I’m an Apple person, I found the set of apps I need, I think they’re excellent. My brother is all-in on Google, from Android to hardware, everything. He also has an excellent set of apps he needs, I have no reason to think he’d be happier switching to Apple.
Apple is years late to everything, so the marketing narrative around that is "Apple would rather do it right than do it early".
No thanks. Happy to be 'early' to mouse, kb, pen and external monitor support on Android. Just got a foldable phone that's perfectly combined my phone + tab use cases, so I can do it all on one device.
What shitty third party app experience, specifically? And are you under the mistaken assumption that everything Apple releases is solid gold? Apple Music is an abomination, Pages screws up formats by default, etc. They are not flawless.
Though it says 'designed for collaboration' it is good to have infinite page for one's own content.
Also it would interesting to see how responsive the collaborative whiteboard would be. Online multiuser whiteboards are really useful when one sees in real-time the action taken by other online users - text being edited, object being dragged by remote users, etc.
Basically useless for actual collaboration. Hope it's at least good enough to present my tablet as a whiteboard while sharing my laptop screen in a meeting.
I'm currently contracting for a corporate client, and my feeling is that "Miro + Teams" is the corporate starter pack.
Freeform looks like Miro or FigJam, and I hate using these types of apps for collaboration. The corporate thought process is: "We're doing remote meetings, so what can we use to replicate the whiteboard in digital form?". But this is the wrong way of thinking. When working remotely, don't just copy and paste analog tools into digital.
When using Miro, I find myself zooming in and out all the fucking time because everyone uses different font sizes. This is much more convenient when you stand in front of a physical whiteboard. It doesn't work with a digital whiteboard. Also, the missing structure makes it almost always an incredible mess. Impossible to find something.
Anyways. Come January I'm done with contracting. Rant over :-)
That's because Miro sets the text size relative to the current zoom level... with even a small number of people it suddenly starts to look like a mess.
FigJam and I believe Freeform don't do this. It's insane how Miro scaled so effectively with base UX issues like this.
This is because for some use cases it is very useful to have font size relative to the zoom level.
At my previous startup (AWW, later acquired by Miro) we "solved" this by allowing people to use either relative or absolute font sizes and pen widths, for exactly this reason. I don't have exact numbers, but a large portion of our (vocal) users really wanted either one or the other.
Is this one of those times where you have to make a really tough choice for your customers (ie, not just today’s customers but a larger set of potential future customers)?
Highly vocal users aren’t always the ones you should listen to.
We could definitely see both use cases as valid. It's one of those questions that doesn't have a definitive right answer.
A trivial example off the top of my head, zoom-relative widths/sizes are super useful in mind mapping and similar activities where you want to "zoom in" (excuse the pun) to a sub-topic and "zoom-out" to see the overall picture. 1000x zoom is useless if your pen stroke is width of the screen.
A counter example is from GP.
We tried to listen to, but not blindly follow, what our (vocal) users were telling us. I'm stressing "vocal" here not because they were obnoxious - just cognizant of the fact that the silent majority is, well, silent. Hopefully the vocal ones are a good proxy, but that isn't always the case.
> ..I find myself zooming in and out all the fucking time because everyone uses different font sizes. This is much more convenient when you stand in front of a physical whiteboard.
Interesting point. Physical whiteboard most often has uniform (and readable) font size because of physiology of humans and default stance when writing on a vertical surface.
Digital whiteboard product team should reflect on that and build feature which mimics that.
In that case, yes, arm length defines text size. But if we all default to 12pt font in a canvas then that’s essentially constrained the same way.
So is the issue that everyone is picking a different font? It’s not even about frame of reference then, maybe. It’s just about a UI guiding behaviour. Maybe label fonts “title” “paragraph” “heading 1” etc. like many apps already seem to do.
> Physical whiteboard most often has uniform (and readable) font size because of physiology of humans and default stance when writing on a vertical surface.
Only if the cohort have roughly similar vision. My vision is roughly one third of the “good” average, so whiteboards have been inaccessible to me my entire life. I used a telescope to read them in school and uni, always had to sit at the fronf… I could do the same at work, but I’d suffer the same “restricted context” problems, at speed.
Digital whiteboards are MUCH better for me. The pan & zoom is awkward, but it’s better than not being able to participate.
You’re right often they do. But we also have people put stickies on the whiteboards and they’re hard to read. It’s not the fault of the whiteboard —-it’s the author who needs to keep this in mind.
Miro isn't a whiteboard, it's a vision board that gets filled by enthusiastic developers at the start of a project and then neglected the rest of the time.
For us FigJam (really similar to Miro) works because we don’t really do asynchronous editing much, most of the time someone prepares the core of it (a screen flow diagram for instance), and during a meeting we iterate through it, discuss and comment the blocs, rearrange as needed.
The main advantage to this approach IMO is the ability to quickly cleanup random bits with approval from the person that wrote them, so you don’t end up with orphans or stuff that clashes with everything else.
In a way it’s really a whiteboard, and it’s “done” once the meeting ends, until the next iteration.
Never heard about Miro but I definitely heard about Teams, and used it. I prefer anything else to it but it works on every OS. This Apple software runs only on Apple devices. I don't even know why they are working on it: if in a team only one person doesn't have a Mac the team will have to use something else, so everyone starts with something else by default.
On teams, I wonder if Apple expects Freeform to be used by corporate clients or if they have another target. Most orgs are office 365 and there’s MS whiteboard and other apps with teams integrations. Maybe they are aiming for something else with this?
Whiteboarding tools are used heavily by students in group projects. Students of today, are workers of tomorrow. So over time it will eat into Miro's userbase. But as with any Apple product since they won't make customisations/features for Enterprise it will never get that far.
O365 'collaboration' is a joke though. That's why all these other alternatives exist. In all the o365 offices I've seen, people end up collaborating on something like Google Docs.
My wish list for the next version of Freeform contains only two items:
• Snap to shape from free-hand drawings (such as a square/line/circle). Other note taking apps have this.
• Infinite Zoom Out and Zoom In. Currently the canvas expands in all directions, but the zoom in is locked to 10% min and 400% max. I want my boards to be able to have 'depth', particularly useful when sketching stuff with a 'drill-down' component.
It would be weird if they don't have snap-to-shape since notes has it. Are you pausing long enough for the snap to happen? Edit: just played with it. there is a lot missing that I would have expected- for example no ruler or fountain pen or a way to customize the toolbar. Really strange for apple to have stepped back from notes
I only want to use a pen on OS X for drawing (actuall "free form" drawing). Until that happens, I would need to buy a $700 paper block called iPad and that's not in my intention.
> I only want to use a pen on OS X for drawing (actuall "free form" drawing). Until that happens,
This has only been possible since the release of Mac OS X Public Beta, "Kodiak" in September of 2000. Hundreds of freehand drawing applications have been developed since, and nearly all the hardware available since has always been supported by the OS without a third-party driver being necessary. Wacom comes to mind as a input device developer of drawing tablets and pens that has been around on Macs long before Mac OS X was first released.
For one that one app. The OS supports them otherwise along with probably hundreds of other applications, as it has always been. But let's assume Freeform did support Wacom tablets; literally no one would buy a Mac for the sole purpose of using Freeform on a third party drawing surface. But people are crazy, and unreasonably so. Because unlike the GP, people will buy an iPad just to draw in Freeform. Annoying yet clever of Apple, if they want to sell iPads.
I want folders... A directory structure feels mandatory for something that's supposed to keep your notes, but for some reason they didn't include it at the outset.
Most of us on HN probably observe some combination of the following.
* Closed ecosystem. Can't share with clients on Windows. Pass.
* Looks like an outdated version of FigJam. Just use FigJam.
* Oh yay, back to illegible handwriting everywhere. Nope.
We will continue to use FigJam or Miro or whatever. This isn't for us.
It's for people like my Mom who will just stumble upon it on their iPad, and use it to plan a funeral with the family, or something along those lines. Non-techies wouldn't even think to use something like FigJam or Miro; this type of software doesn't otherwise exist to them. But now it does, in the form of Freeform.
About a third of our company uses PC or Chromebook, so I guess they're out of luck? Imagine trying to use this with a vendor or a client, and they can't get into the session, ugh.
What people want in a collaboration session is low barrier to entry: everybody should just click a thing and be in the session without having to do anything else, or be signed up for anything, or own anything they don't already own. I don't see that this provides that.
Figjam is far from perfect, but at least it gets that right.
>About a third of our company uses PC or Chromebook, so I guess they're out of luck? Imagine trying to use this with a vendor or a client, and they can't get into the session, ugh.
but why would you try? just use multiple platform supported applications to begin with. no one cares if you use word or ipages to take notes but if you want to collaborate dont start with apple's euphemistic definition of it
After telling my wife that Apple made a FigJam clone, she looked at Freeform and said "So it's like Jamboard?" I had no idea Google also made a Figjam clone.
I’ve been an Apple user for 40+ years, and I really don’t want to tally up my lifetime customer value to Apple. However, I don’t trust them for software which is supposed to support collaboration. Personally focused software, great OS, and beautiful hardware yes, collaboration, no.
I almost never work in an environment with 100% homogeneous hardware and OS. A large portion of my career has been working as a contractor or consultant. Each new client has a different stack of tools. Any tools for collaborative work need to be as cross-platform as possible. For many of my jobs the tools also need to work in all regions without VPN (no Google in China).
Even though I have a Mac, when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, because they don’t understand that Windows users can’t read that.
Until Freeform works on Windows and Android, it’s not collaborative, it’s a walled garden.
I’m not following the dichotomy here. “Collaborative” doesn’t mean open and universal and free and cross platform… it means collaborative.
I also wouldn’t use Freeform (or Pages, or Reminders) in a professional capacity where I need to work with lots of people in heterogenous environments.
But I love Freeform (and Reminders) at home with family. I find them very collaborative AND a walled garden. The two seem like entirely compatible attributes.
Collaborative to me means I can easily add a person to a team and not have to spend a lot of time or money getting them different hardware or OS than what they already have access to. Depending on the particular situation, it's possible that Apple tools are collaborative, but even in the Bay Area working in design and engineering, I've never worked anywhere (including Apple itself) where everyone was on MacOS 100% of the time.
To me, the bottom line is that "collaborative" and "cross-platform" are not synonymous, and are distinct properties.
> Collaborative to me means I can easily add a person to a team and not have to spend a lot of time or money getting them different hardware or OS
This is assigning meaning to that word that just doesn't exist. There are separate variables at play:
- Collaboration features
- Platforms supported
- Cost
If I take what you said at face value, the software is no longer collaborative when it becomes cost prohibitive, but that doesn't make sense either. The software can be none or any or all of those things. If your criteria requires all three, then pick software that meets all three. Your need for all three has no bearing on how effectively collaborative this is for people who only need one.
In my mind, this tooling is collaborative, full stop.
This tooling is not cross-platform*.
If your needs require both boxes to be checked, a different tool like Miro is probably for you.
- *Although it does have a web interface, which admittedly I haven't used, so I can't comment on how effective it is.
Within a family, that can work, but even with my partner, who hates Windows so much that she uses a personally supplied Mac despite her company not officially supporting it, we use Google docs to work on stuff together.
It's partially familiarity, but also portability and functionality. I go back and forth between Microsoft and Google suites depending on work situations, and despite how much Apple has worked on Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc., they're still not as complete or common as Microsoft or Google. Adding a third set of tools is a little like being fluent in 3 languages. It's too much of an overload.
The only professional situation where I've seen any of these Apple applications commonly used is Keynote by design teams. The typography and alignment tools in Keynote are better than Google and Microsoft, but those same design teams forget that no one outside of current Mac user can do anything with a .key file. Yes, I know iCloud on the web kinda sorta works, but it's so not Apple's first priority. Microsoft is still struggling to make their suite work as universally as Googles, and Apple is way behind here.
If I didn't know other tools and I never needed to work with people outside of the walled garden, I might put more time into using Apple's "productivity" (AKA iWork) apps.
once you start using that kind of app with literally anybody, you start building a mass of users that's gonna end up dragging others into that walled garden or exclude others from using it. hell, even when you just start using it alone, you begin to accumulate stuff that's gonna weigh you down, and make it harder to switch, to pick something else, and make it more likely that you're just gonna continue using this thing. and then perhaps use it for collaboration. which is gonna work just fine at first, if you happen to have apple users around. but then, whoops, somebody doesn't have an apple device. depending on value of that content and value of collaboration, it could be very, very awkward, to force someone to use it, or to bargain with someone about using it, which will probably end up at 'well, you could buy a used apple device? or something? idk'. that's...not great.
ability to let people collaborate freely and conveniently is one of the aspects of collaboration. if there's no way for someone to collaborate (such as, no app on other platforms,
so no way to collab without owning/buying an apple device), there's just no collaboration. it's anti-collaboration, even. others are specifically prohibited from collaborating, unless they clear some kind of requirement.
with closed stuff like this, you always open yourself up to a future scenario where somebody will either not be able to use it and get excluded, or get forced to use it. it's not even on the web. it's a proprietary format. it's a dead end for content. i'd be very interested to hear what kind of export this thing does, if it even can do that.
honestly, these kinds of apps and walled garden things should get shot at much sooner, without even getting the benefit of 'well it's just for personal use/for apple users - it's fine' (no it's not. soon usage spreads to other things, and sooner people become entrenched in proprietary stuff and drag others in with them), before they end up becoming a bigger problem, like imessage bubbles have, or whatever interoperability thing has. the choice that you're making by choosing things like this is 'am I comfortable with selling a $429 iPhone SE or a $329 iPad to my friend/my colleague/my family/my kid/some random person, just so they would be able to get on a thing with me'. in walled gardens, you end up not just operating as a 'user/customer', but also as a salesman for that company.
I'd argue if it was completely incidental then it's network effect. If it's deliberately done to achieve anticompetitive outcome it's more than that. In the case of Apple, we know they do these things for anticompetitive reasons. They are on the record in email chains discussing how they weaponised iMessage in exactly that way. So I think they don't get the benefit of a benign assumption here ... it's more than likely they are specifically doing this as a way to drive a wedge that forces people into their ecosystem against their will.
yes, and? (edit: well, actually, no, you're just ignoring the lock-in part. but even if so,) in this case, it's a network that's more limited than others in terms of who's able to access it and what hurdles they have to overcome. like, network effect can be pretty bad, but this, mixed with ecosystem lock-in, is even worse.
I tried to read your message few times with an open spirit but I don't buy it.
The moment I, for any reason, I cannot collaborate unless I get my hands back on an Apple device (and possibly Apple id which is even more complicated) it stops being a collaborative software.
I sort of have an idea on what he meant. Everyone in my family and close friends have at least one Apple device and the “collaborative” environment in that sense is wonderful, especially with Reminders, notes, sharing files etc.
It however fails once you go outside.
Might be a stupid analogy so let’s net focus on this but I sort of see it like this:in my country, we can speak our language and it works for collaboration. Once you go outside, it fails. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful as a “collaborative” tool for that environment.
I think you and op just might have different scales of where you think it should work well enough.
More like everyone entrenched in the ecosystem. I can't imagine this is a super great experience for someone who only has an iPhone SE but non-Apple everything else. Especially when the creator is used to the canvas of their 27" Studio Display.
> Is Slack, Teams, or Trello not collaborative because it won't run on my XBox360?
This is not their point because your XBox360 is not something you use to perform your job (or, at least, it's not something most people use to perform their jobs). If I use a Windows computer for work and I can't use this software to collaborate on that work, then this isn't really "collaborative" software in the practical sense.
You’re expressing an ideology here. It’s not pragmatic and doesn’t reflect real world experience.
Yes, I have friends who don’t have Apple devices and I can’t use Freeform with them, so of course there are limits.
I recently sent my 85 year old mother an iPad so she can more easily watch videos and do video calls. She can use Freeform with me, but there is no chance she would be able to use a Linux or Windows collaboration tool, or even something web based.
By your logic, there is no such thing as a collaborative tool, but this is obviously not what people mean.
I agree with brookst. The fact that most Apple first-party software only works on Apple devices is a given, and any time you call an app “collaborative” it’s a given that we’re talking only about the devices which can run the software.
What are we supposed to call it when they add collaboration to one of their apps? “Adding walled garden” is nonsensical, because to whatever extent it’s a walled garden, that was already the case before adding collaboration.
I’ve worked in design companies where every machine… including the bookkeeper’s, was a Mac. This app Won’t run into any issues in that environment.
It’s like every time somebody posts a commercial SaaS app people will ask if it can be self-hosted. We know what these things are. Seems fair to start there.
I've worked and interviewed at several tech companies that were nearly or fully Mac-exclusive. The only two exceptions that come to mind was at one where the finance guy had a Windows laptop because he lived in Excel and at one where one of the backend guys ran a custom built Linux tower, both of whom were the oddballs in their respective companies with everybody else toting MacBooks.
> I cannot collaborate unless I get my hands back on ...( Apple id which is even more complicated) it stops being a collaborative software.
getting an Apple id doesn't require apple hardware and most of the tools are available via icloud.com. if an apple id prevents something from being a collaborative tool then google docs, Microsoft 365, Slack, et al are not collaborative tools.
You sound like a non-Facebook user complaining about Facebook messenger not being collaborative enough. Fair point (can't use FB if you're not subscribed) but completely not representative of the greater population or (in this case) Apple's target market.
Meh. The moment I, for any reason, cannot collaborate unless I get my hands on a computer it stops being collaborative.
Or not. 'Collaborative' doesn't mean 'accessible by anyone'. Collaborative just means capable of supporting two or more parties working together, and freeform clearly meets the criteria...
Very interesting that people can have such different definitions.
I suppose your view is that any tightly controlled software can’t be collaborative? Like Epic, that likely helps your health care professionals and labs exchange info and collaborate on your care, or air traffic control systems where lots of people collaborate to route planes and control airspace.
Those kinds of things aren’t collaborative software because they run on limited platforms and access is tightly controlled. Is that congruent with your viewpoint?
Ask apple why does it take them up to January 4th 2023 to contact me to recover my account since I've forgot the password. I'm locked out of my account since Nov 19th
I think the walled garden is the whole point here, and you are not the target for this app. It’s no coincidence that the sample they show on their devices is for a student (high school?) newspaper. This is like the blue texts in iMessage. Get them while they’re young, and they’ll be hooked for life. Imagine the shame of being excluded from a high school group project because, “we’re all doing it in Freeform, sorry.” Better ask mom for an iPhone just to be safe.
Aren't US schools blanketed with Chromebooks? That's really the only market where iMessage monopoly is a thing. The rest of the world uses cross-platform options.
I haven‘t checked recently, are there any good alternative tablets, running Android maybe?
I personally think iPads are insanely powerful and without (serious) competition.
Having used an iPad for my last couple years in high school, the machines were a total joke. Totally useless for english and history classes, and barely usable for math and science courses. When people weren't using them for classwork, they became instant distractions. The administration tried implementing MDM but ended up finding that the only solution was taking away the iPads during instructional time. Not to mention, ushering in iPads actually forced our computer science classes to shut down, since students no longer had machines with Python interpreters on them.
The iPad is insanely powerful and without serious competition, but completely useless in a classroom setting. Most people would prefer the laptops we had, teachers and students alike.
> Even though I have a Mac, when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, because they don’t understand that Windows users can’t read that.
Windows users can't even read some doc versions. Resumes should either be text or pdf. Anything else is a gamble.
There's also a high chance that even if the .doc file is readable, that it'll be displayed incorrectly, even if the user is opening it with Word but especially if they're using something else that can open Word docs (WordPad, TextEdit, LibreOffice, Pages, and many others).
Absolutely agree that PDF is the best choice. Readable and correctly renderable by just about everything, and even fixes the problem of missing fonts.
I guess you don’t realize Microsoft has been doing this with .docx and .xlsx for years. They claim it’s an open standard but it doesn’t work flawlessly in anything but their software. It’s more subtle but the same type of walled garden trickery.
Someone's CV in .docx would be readable at least and, most of the time with intact formatting (especially if the author didn't use spaces as indentation), even if opened in some {libre,star,open}office or whatever, heck, on modern Windows you can open .docx in Wordpad, ie you don't even need MS Office on Windows to open .docx.
But I don't even know what is the Pages[0] format, extension, what apps can open it on Windows.[1]
[0] like really, I never in my life needed this.
[1] yes, you just can open it in 7z, but the similar can be done with .docx too.
I don't mean to be dis-charitable to your comments but it sounds like you're saying that people should use the currently bigger walled garden over the currently smaller walled garden?
> Even though I have a Mac, when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, because they don’t understand that Windows users can’t read that.
Hiring is hard enough. You want to know something you can't possibly know, so you have to use very imperfect, approximate signals. I don't know why you'd want to kneecap yourself on purpose like this. You might as well just roll dice and hire when 7 comes up.
> Hiring is hard enough. You want to know something you can't possibly know, so you have to use very imperfect, approximate signals. I don't know why you'd want to kneecap yourself on purpose like this. You might as well just roll dice and hire when 7 comes up.
You have to use the signals you have.
And if the signal someone has sent for certain professional roles is "I don't understand appropriate formats to send documents in" then that is the signal you got.
> Hiring is hard enough. You want to know something you can't possibly know, so you have to use very imperfect, approximate signals. I don't know why you'd want to kneecap yourself on purpose like this. You might as well just roll dice and hire when 7 comes up.
In this case the signal is that the candidate would probably be a difficult colleague, since they couldn’t be bothered to spend the extra 30 seconds it takes to export to PDF from Pages. Or they didn’t know how, also a disqualifier.
Honestly, I kinda get it. I'm tired of people pushing Xcode dotfiles and __MACOSX folders to the main branch. If you're not conscious of the machine you use and the formats you employ, how can you be expected to collaborate effectively?
I've been doing this for decades and I don't even know what an Xcode dotfile is.
Maybe you mean .DS_Store files? That's probably best described as a Finder dotfile... For that, maybe just add the line ".DS_Store" to your .gitignore (or the equivalent for your SCM software)?
>Even though I have a Mac, when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, because they don’t understand that Windows users can’t read that.
or maybe they do understand, and are self selecting away from people like you...
Who would ever only want to work for a company that exclusively uses Apple products? That is an insane level of fanboyism that doesn't indicate a fully rational actor.
Apple's approach to collaboration is particularly embarrassing when you have tools like Figma that enable teams to work seamlessly across devices and platforms.
Just a few days ago I needed to edit a CSV file from a codebase I was working on. Opened it up in Numbers, changed a couple of cells, saved it. Later I realized none of my changes were in the CSV file. Turns out Apple saved it as some kind of other proprietary file. From now on I'll just open my files in VSCode, because that's easier than worrying about getting sucked into the Apple ecosystem.
It sounds like you need to export instead. CSV export isn't under save because it doesn't retain all the details of the document (such as formatting). This behaviour is standard and can be seen in MS Excel, LibreOffice, etc. as well.
> CSV export isn't under save because it doesn't retain all the details of the document (such as formatting). This behaviour is standard and can be seen in MS Excel, LibreOffice, etc. as well.
Office warns me my changes will be lost and offers to change to XLSX. Numbers just changes it silently, without warning.
Opened it up in Numbers, changed a couple of cells, saved it. Later I realized none of my changes were in the CSV file. Turns out Apple saved it as some kind of other proprietary file.
Yes, the Numbers program saved it as a Numbers document.
Just like Excel saves Excel files.
That's why it's called "import," not "open."
When you pressed Save, a Save As dialog popped up asking for a name. If you had just saved it to the same file, there would be no Save As dialog. It wouldn't ask you for a name because it knew the name.
This is standard across every app on every Mac going back decades. I don't use Windows very often, but I believe it's the same there, too. You aren't asked for a filename if you're updating the same file.
It doesn't sound like an Apple problem, it sounds like you didn't pay attention, and when the computer did what you asked, you blamed the computer. There's nothing Apple or Microsoft or anyone else can do about that.
You're right, Excel does save back to CSV. It discards half your changes because they can't be saved in a CSV, modifies anything that could possibly be a date, and rounds random numbers, THEN it saves it as a CSV.
No, you can't. It will import and re-export every cell, not just the one you modify. This includes interpreting dates and rounding numbers that exceed Excel's max value (instead of interpreting as a string)
They have a small banner at the top to warn about this, but it doesn't even address the things that were already lost the instant you opened it.
Numbers opens the CSV file, gives the user a screen to control import settings, and supports exporting as a CSV with custom delimeters.
Excel does save back to CSV. It discards half your changes because they can't be saved in a CSV, modifies anything that could possibly be a date, and rounds random numbers, THEN it saves it as a CSV.
Numbers makes this an explicit "Export" option because silently saving these types of changes is super dangerous.
Yeah this was the point I was trying to make. Obviously I didn't pay attention, but like...if I open a CSV file, my intuition tells me that if I click "save", it will save to the original CSV file. That's how most other programs work. Just because Excel also does it, doesn't make it a good idea. It's a bad idea and it's a hallmark of legacy software.
Excel will just silently modify everything and "save" it back as a CSV. I would rather that both Excel and Numbers only saved to CSV as an Export option.
Out of the choices out there, Apple allows for the easiest collaboration. Airdrop for me is the biggest player, integrated iMessage into MacOS and every other OS. Planning a trip with just these two things is much easier than whatever I could’ve accomplished between two Linux or two windows computers. Unless I used WhatsApp or something like that, but that’s WhatsApp allowing collaboration, not Windows
>Even though I have a Mac, when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, because they don’t understand that Windows users can’t read that.
Yes, there are solutions if everyone is onboard with the arrangement. However, sharing a .pages or .key file with a prospective employer or client is asking them to do extra work, and is rude at best and a deal killer at worst.
As a corollary, sharing .7zip or .tar or .rar when a .zip would do just fine are equivalent mistakes.
For me sending anything but a PDF is a deal killer. It's just odd to me to send your resume in a document format that supports editing. Take the time to make it into a PDF.
Until Freeform works on Windows and Android, it’s not collaborative, it’s a walled garden.
Perhaps the solution is for Android to make a better app, and better apps in general, that will draw people away from the iOS ecosystem.
Competition is supposed to be good. So compete.
All I ever hear from the Android side is a lot of "walled garden" pearl clutching. Seldom any innovation, and evidently no innovation good enough to break the magical spell of Apple.
When Android does innovate, and Apple chooses to adopt a method, then it's all "embrace, extend, extinguish! It's Micro$oft all over again!" As if Android never gets sloppy seconds on features, or half-baked mimicry of Apple products and services.
It's this continuous whining and moaning that makes Apple, and Apple users, tune out the Android dev bros. They're just reactionary and it's easy to not take them seriously.
The bottom line is the same now as it's always been: Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.
Competition is great until your competitors use their power to prevent third-parties from distributing software freely. Then it becomes a monopoly, by modern standards.
Amen to that. There have been multiple times in my career where I've stopped the process the moment when a recruiter asked me to fill in a shitty looking .doc or .docx file with the same info that is in the .PDF file that's containing my CV that I've already submitted.
Until Direct X games work on macos, it is not collaborative, it is a walled garden. Until all PS5 games work on Xbox X I can't collaborate in multiplayer, the reverse is true as well.
Many games support cross-platform play these days, so yes you certainly can collaborate between PS5 and Xbox X, if you choose the correct 'applications'.
I mean, they can they just have to convert it. Is it that different from sending it as a PDF because you need to have installed a PDF reader or Acrobat to read it?
The only reason .docx files are more easily readable is because everyone makes a point of natively building in the ability to convert them because it's so ubiquitous. But it's a Microsoft format that Microsoft put a lot of effort into locking down as much as they could get away with, only backing off on it when they started getting into anti-trust trouble.
> Even though I have a Mac, when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, because they don’t understand that Windows users can’t read that.
As someone who can remember the 1990s, when .DOC was the standard file format for any kind of business and much academic work, I find this terribly amusing.
If anyone from the Freeform MacOS team is reading this, please let me zoom in and out with Apple Key + Mouse scroll. Also have Apple Key + Mouse pointer to move across the canvas. Using the trackpad is not intuitive. It isn’t an iPad.
This is cool and welcome. A golf-pencil sized Apple Pencil for iPhone would be pretty awesome.
I'd love to see Apple take on google docs, but pages and numbers seem far behind. Notes is getting insanely powerful, but collaboration is still buggy.
How does this differ from the Notes app which has many (most?) of the features in the description? Is Freeform just supposed to make these features more discoverable?
Infinite canvas, super simple, lightning fast, near zero learning curve. Powerful enough. No arbitrary lock in to the apple ecosystem. Free. Open source.
“Let’s do collaboration”, says the company locking people who dare not be in its ecosystem out. Gross, IMO.
I recently had to make some sketches of schematics. On iPad I tried excalidraw, ms whiteboard, notes, notability, and sketchbook: drawing the same thing on each. To my surprise, notes actually worked the best for me with the snapping editing and exporting. Notability was also very good, but I tried that only after finishing in notes.
Excalidraw works with Apple Pencil which is great but doesn’t have snapping and straightening of lines.
I just tried to use it, as the limitations of Freeform bother me, and Jamboard has frustrating privacy implications.
Unfortunately, palm rejection on Excalidraw isn’t great - each time I rest my hand on the screen to start drawing with the pencil, random lines get drawn on the screen.
Shame, as the potential is high. Will bookmark for future in the hopes it improves. Thanks!
Note is primarily text based but can include medias and some limited canvas object, this new interface is canvas based and can include text and medias.
I don’t see wall-mount iPad happen. They’d have to offer it in to many different sizes (that also is the reason I never understood why people thought Apple’d start making smart TVs)
The UI also wouldn’t be as good as that of an iPad on your lap, I think, and you can already use airplay to mirror your iPad’s screen on a large screen (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204289)
Finally, if you have a Mac, it can run this program, too, and thus show this on a large screen.
I'm not sure what you mean here - to be honest I'm not sure what the strategy is with something like this. Corporates typically don't have Macs (though they will have phones)
Thanks for saying this! My mind is much more "outline shaped" than "infinite canvas" shaped. I've noticed that the infinite canvas approach has started to gain popularity (we use FigJam a lot at work), and I find it somewhat disorienting. But others really like it, so I'm just trying to adapt. Maybe there will be an outliner craze in a few years...who knows.
Apple has a history of adding apps like this all the way back to MacWrite, MacPaint. Their strategy has been consistent since the beginning of the Mac; they provide end to end experiences that work out of the box. In the case of collaboration the use case has become so essential to their experience that they needed to build it themselves instead of relying on third parties. They do the work of integration instead of asking the user to do it. The downside is that the cross-Apple experiences are sometimes not great but that's not the problem they are trying to solve.
When I moved to apple many years ago, I was a big fan of an app that did something very very similar to what Freeform is now doing - now I love the fact that someone’s finally made something that supports this layout of all manner of things in this manner, but sadly I’m not sure that I can drop my use of note style outliner thingies now - FSNotes is now my main note taker, but work and project ideas, they may get sketched out in FreeForm, I’m certainly very happy to see it in my phone, and am hoping my aging MacBook will also support it.
This is going strongly after the Miro app. Being a longer term Miro user, it's my primary method for recording notes and collaborating, however, it's expensive. I pay $15 a month and I tend to share my notes with 1 or 2 people per board.
I pay for the freelancer version and if this version from apple allows me to share with non-apple users, I will switch. I hate paying so much for a software tool and if it's good enough it feels like the Microsoft Teams killing Slack outcome.
It allows a cleanly filling a freeform shape with a colour without weird aliasing effects that I get in Morpholio trace or messing around with tolerance in Affinity photo or having to think about control points in one of the more illustrator like apps. I wonder how they are doing that, since I’ve been asking Morpholio for that feature for a while and they don’t seem’to be able to implement it.
It must be fun to work somewhere where these Apple-only apps are actually used in a professional environment. Maybe at Apple itself or a small design shop or something. I can't imagine anywhere else where someone would rely on Apple services without worrying about lock-in or not have a cross-platform alternative already in place.
From the marketing, it seems targeted at groups of high school students who all happen to have thousand-dollar Apple tablets.
I’ve been using Macs since 1989, and I don’t get this. I’ll try it with my kids, though. We all have iPads. They use theirs for games at the moment, mostly. I don’t use mine much anymore.
No one has mentioned moleskine flow yet, I would suggest checking it out. Many similar features, they are very responsive to user requests, and the tools are beautiful and well designed. My work generally looks better when done on moleskine flow than any other software, like procreate.
Quite disappointed to see it only runs on newer macs, especially so as it’s about the same as an app I was using maybe 20 years back ! (Axon idea processor - the only thing I missed about windows!)
I switched back to Monterey after 3 weeks of WindowServer crashing 3+ times a day with external monitors. Yes I tried a different dock and monitors, cables and what not.
Generally, this indicates that digital collaborative "whiteboards" are becoming a common thing, and I for one think that it's about time our UX paradigms properly allowed us to work outside of slides and documents.
I hand-wrote 'hello' on the freeform canvas. I tried command-F to search for the scribble, it couldn't find it. On an infinite canvas. What use is that to man or beast?
like apple’s incessant UX changes, and reliance on users for QA/Bugs (vs actually QA-ing their junk before launch)… Freeform is another useless attempt at replacing existing tools in the space that actually work. band wagon, meet coat-tails.
Interesting, first I hear Obsidian coming out with Canvas, then LogSeq with Whiteboards, now this. Has any other party come to the bandwagon of "Infinite Canvases"?
I'll take the opposite stance of most of the people in this thread and say: I love this.
To me, this feels like an echo of the Apple that I miss. The Mac didn't just become the creative powerhouse it is today because of the killer hardware or great operating system; it was the suite of excellent first party apps. iWork, Aperture, iMovie, Garage Band, Final Cut.
I see echoes of those apps in Freeform, and I love it and hope they do more. I can't remember the last time Apple announced an entirely new, well, App. I felt similar excitement when they announced Translate a while ago, but that's not quite the same.
Honest, when I first glanced at the title I thought it said “fiefdom” and thought: yeah we all know that already. Sadly there’s a reason my mind jumped to that, right?
Yeah what? I use macs a lot but Messages is abject garbage and isn't even a serious competitor to Teams/Slack/Discord. It's meant for texting but on your computer...
It also feeds your ideas, sketches, and notes directly to Apple. Don't put any secrets into this app!
Buried somewhere in the EULA I suspect there is a paragraph giving Apple perpetual, unlimited, non-exclusive rights to anything that would be looked at and deemed interesting.
I haven't found a specific EULA for Freeform, but you can easily read various Apple EULA's at <https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/>.
Looking at the EULA for Numbers (which I picked essentially at random, though you could argue that Numbers and Freeflow would likely have very similar EULA's).
In that EULA, they say:
> Title and intellectual property rights in and to any content displayed by or accessed through the Apple Software belong to the respective content owner.
You are the "respective content owner" of the ideas, sketches, and notes created within Freeflow.
When you send things using your gmail address, you still retain the IP rights to your material and property attached inside, but you also give Google a perpetual, unrestricted, non-exclusive right to that material, should it be looked at and deemed interesting.
The same thing probably applies to stuff made in this app by Apple.
If I came across that in an Apple EULA I wouldn't be surprised, but I've read several EULAs found at the site I linked to and haven't found any language that suggests what you describe.
This is a free app, easily removable, not invasive in any way, no ads, no personal data misuse, no tracking, not shoved in your face, not replacing any other apps, not disabling anything else, no strings attached.
You must be very cynical to see this as "market distortion".
It's market distortion because it competes with companies who charge a fee for maintaining and developing their application, by entering their market entirely cross-financed from a immensely profitable product of a completely different industry.
If it's NOT market distortion, it means it is possible to create and operate a cloud-based multi-platform collaboration application, free of charge for corporate and private use, without the need of any direct revenue stream within that market. I'm not even talking profit, I mean no need for any revenue whatsoever.
I ran the dark mode stream for Figma. Previously ran Atlassian’s dark mode stream. Did dark mode on a side project. Have talks online about dark mode. Dark mode is my jam.
Dark mode for collaborative canvases is incredibly hard. On the surface it seems like all content on a collaborative canvas is informational (I.e. text or diagram lines). In dark mode you can transform the bg to black and informational foreground content to white. The problem is that there’s no clarity to what lines are informational and which are artistic. You should invert a line that’s an arrow from one sticky to another, but you shouldn’t invert a line that’s the eyes and mouth on a smiley face on a yellow circle bg.
There’s also a ton of situations where there’s actually no correct way to transition from light to dark. If you notice none of the big collaborative canvases have dark mode, primarily for this reason. Happy to post examples of these impossible scenarios if people are curious.
In my eyes there’s only really two ways to do dark mode for collaborative canvases - either you choose what mode you’re in when you create the canvas (and it stays in that mode for everyone) or you use a GAN to do style transfer between the two. It’s very tricky to get it right.
Just after Obsidian releases Canvas. Coincidence? I don't think so...
Are you under the impression that Apple saw Canvas then fired up its own clone in a matter of days, then invented an iTime Machine and went back in time eight months to show demos to developers of the app it hasn't made yet?
I reckon the other way around: someone from obsidian found out that this is meant to launch soon and they didn't want apple take all the wind from their sail. Chances are low, but bigger than what you cynically described.
Ok ok. What you call cynism was supposed to be dry humour. Anyway...
To be more serious, i really wonder what the Obsidian hackers will do with Canvas, in the (semi-)open environement of Obsidian plugins, vs what mainstream pieces of software from commercial companies will offer, version after version.
My personal opinion is this is unlikely to work and that the reason iPad lacks a “killer app” is largely because the app ecosystem is too dysfunctional for one to emerge organically from third party ecosystems. Because the iPad is a more powerful platform than iPhone, and (especially) because people’s “session times” tend to be longer on iPad vs iPhone, you need to invest more to make a good iPad app. On the iPhone it’s enough to save people a little time vs the web and connect them more readily to a service while mobile (Uber, Instagram, Amazon, etc)
iPad offers the chance to do something much deeper. But there is so much more risk — will people pay higher prices (App Store price expectations are lower than desktop), will Apple approve the app, will it get noticed in the store amid all the crap. Are the APIs powerful enough to make what you want to make. Etc.