22 ms·

Freeform: a new app designed for creative collaboration

367 points by dsego 4y ago

tmalsburg2 4y ago
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?
- Spooky23 4y ago
  The big platform players all need their own spin on Mural. They probably think it’s like Figma for business. With hybrid work a thing, everyone is trying to win vertically integrated online collaboration. Eventually they’ll sell a wall mount ipad.
  - BirAdam 4y ago
    Never underestimate the ability of Apple to completely miss an obvious corporate product.
    - chid 4y ago
      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)
  - Someone 4y ago
    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 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.
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  It seems to look like an infinite canvas, which reminds me of the excellent Concepts app (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/concepts/id560586497 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/concepts/id560586497). Handwriting support in Concepts doesn't feel as good as Notes or Procreate so I imagine it'll be better in Freeform.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    https://excalidraw.com https://excalidraw.com 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.
    - mandmandam 4y ago
      Nothing too substantive to contribute here, but yeah I really love Excalidraw. It's exemplary, and I really hope it grows.
      - rpastuszak 4y ago
        Same, it’s simple, open and snappy as f*ck
    - twobitshifter 4y ago
      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.
    - oarsinsync 4y ago
      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!
- Twisell 4y ago
  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.
  - tmalsburg2 4y ago
    My 4yo doesn’t think that Notes is primarily text based. It also has an infinite canvas and you can share a note with others to collaborate.
    - Twisell 4y ago
      Unless I'm wrong it's not a vector canvas once saved you can edit shape individually, also you can include media inside this canvas.
jasode 4y ago
>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.
- amelius 4y ago
  Yes, it's an egocentric company, that's for sure, but most people here already know that.
- achow 4y ago
  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.
- zitterbewegung 4y ago
  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.
maegul 4y ago
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.
shafyy 4y ago
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 :-)
- achow 4y ago
  > ..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.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    I think it’s as simple as: a whiteboard has a frame of reference. An infinite canvas doesn’t.
    - achow 4y ago
      The question is if you are in front of 2 miles wide by 100 ft high whiteboard, would your letter size differ?
      - Waterluvian 4y ago
        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.
felixthehat 4y ago
Seems very much like Figma's FigJam https://www.figma.com/figjam/ https://www.figma.com/figjam/
marban 4y ago
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...
- interpol_p 4y ago
  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
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    What's your gripe with OneNote? I used it a few years ago and remember enjoying it much more than Apple Notes, especially on desktop.
    - kyawzazaw 4y ago
      it somehow doesn't even ink to text on my iPad
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        It did on my Surface, for what that's worth.
    - PascLeRasc 4y ago
      Typing latency is measured in the tens of seconds.
      - szdva 4y ago
        Must be using the same GUI framework that they use for Office apps on Windows ;-)
codeisawesome 4y ago
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.
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  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
- njitram 4y ago
  Surprisingly enough, notes does have snap to shape the feature, really weird decision to NOT have it in Freeform unfortunately
- chrisandchris 4y ago
  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.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > 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.
eduction 4y ago
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.
- chrisandchris 4y ago
  Probably, yes. 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.
  - Arubis 4y ago
    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.
  - FeloniousHam 4y ago
    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.
    - ubercow13 4y ago
user3939382 4y ago
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?
mythhouse 4y ago
Looks like this lets me use apple pen on my ipad. I wish i could do that on obsidian canvas.
xnx 4y ago
I wish collaborative outliners (Workflowy, Dynalist, etc.) were a fraction as popular as whiteboarding apps.
- rpdillon 4y ago
  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.
lizardactivist 4y ago
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.
- ezfe 4y ago
  lol
- buffington 4y ago
  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/ 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.
  - lizardactivist 4y ago
    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.
    - buffington 4y ago
      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.
willyt 4y ago
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.
saos 4y ago
Man I wish Apple bought out Figma instead.
- rvz 4y ago
  Just for Apple to shut it down for other platforms except for Apple platforms just like they did for Dark Sky? No thanks and no deal.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
naltroc 4y ago
canvas zeitgeist? Yesterday there were two posts about two other apps featuring an infinite canvas, and today has the same thing but by Apple. hn is canvasing us for canvases
- chid 4y ago
  I saw the obsidian one but what was the other? https://obsidian.md/canvas https://obsidian.md/canvas
  - jonas-w 4y ago
    Maybe they are talking about https://d2lang.com/tour/intro/ https://d2lang.com/tour/intro/
    - chid 4y ago
      doesn't quite make sense given they are so different - there was this again recently posted though https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096668
nowherebeen 4y ago
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.
lolive 4y ago
Just after Obsidian releases Canvas. Coincidence? I don't think so... https://obsidian.md/canvas https://obsidian.md/canvas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34066824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34066824
- reaperducer 4y ago
  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?
  - Bishonen88 4y ago
    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.
    - lolive 4y ago
      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.
- dagmx 4y ago
  Freeform was announced in June at WWDC. It most definitely was in development before that date as well. Even this press release you’re replying to was released before Obsidian’s canvas was announced.
- timjver 4y ago
  Whether or not it is a coincidence depends on whether Obsidian planned this. Apple isn't going to base their release schedule on something like this.
s1mon 4y ago
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.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  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.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    I've also had this experience; it's a major UX fail. I uninstalled Numbers/Pages after it.
    - ezfe 4y ago
      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.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        Neither one is good, but at least Excel warns me formatting will be lost. I wish they'd warn you on first operation that CSV can't handle, and ask.
Hippocrates 4y ago
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.
- killerdhmo 4y ago
  Have you tried the new notes in 16.2 / 13.1? It’s gotten a lot faster!
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    Yes, it looks like to rewrote the collaboration syncing code for Freeform and it helped Notes a lot. Probably improved collab in iWork apps, too.
TrickyRick 4y ago
Already submitted... so many times https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33973540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33973540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33985553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33985553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33980763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33980763
MexicanJoe 4y ago
Is this not just Good Notes? https://www.goodnotes.com/ https://www.goodnotes.com/
kinnth 4y ago
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.
fattybob 4y ago
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.
whoopsie 4y ago
No dark mode. Why?
- jjcm 4y ago
  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.
LunarAurora 4y ago
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... [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-whiteboard/digital-whiteboard-app https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-whit... [2] https://workspace.google.com/products/jamboard/ https://workspace.google.com/products/jamboard/ [3] https://www.figma.com/figjam/ https://www.figma.com/figjam/ [4] The others are MURAL/invision at 2B (not including Lucid)
- crazygringo 4y ago
  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".
  - LunarAurora 4y ago
    > Their apps seem to be successful as intended. OK. Good to know. I wasn’t really trying to give any definitive conclusion. It is just that I don't see them mentioned, that is all.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  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.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
We'll have to see how this works. It may be a good fit for the team I'm working with. I'm writing a native iOS app. Everyone has iPhones (It's an iPhone app, basically). The Azure guy has a PC, but everyone else uses Macs. I can't get the team to use Slack (the Azure guy does, but everyone else wants to use Messages, which is a huge PitA). Sometimes, we need to find the tool that everyone uses; not the one that fits our worldview.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > everyone else wants to use Messages Why? Messages seems horribly equipped to handle professional communications, especially compared to options like Slack.
  - SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
    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...
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    In reply to both: Yes. I agree. Messages sucks. But most of the team is nontechnical, and don’t want to use Slack. I am not in a position to insist otherwise. Messages works OK for most quick conversations, but is no good for anything of technical substance. So I am keeping my options open for alternative mediums that the team will actually use.
eternalban 4y ago
Need OS X advice here: am happy with 11.5.x on M1. Any issue upgrading to the tip 16.x as required for this software? Same q for iPad as well. /tia
speedgoose 4y ago
A collaboration tool stuck to Apple ‘s operating systems is pretty useless.
colinhb 4y ago
At first glance it looks like Muse[1], built by Heroku alum, caught Apple's attention. [1]: https://museapp.com https://museapp.com
CA0DA 4y ago
"Apple Whiteboard"
exabrial 4y ago
Requires Ventura so I'm out. 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. It's Ventura that's a problem, not my hardware.
karaterobot 4y ago
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.
- rib3ye 4y ago
  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.
  - chadlavi 4y ago
    to be fair, Google's (terrible) version of this predates figjam by quite a bit, and maybe even predates Miro.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  >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
thebeardisred 4y ago
I'm surprised at the lack of comparisons to the Jamboard (https://workspace.google.com/products/jamboard/ https://workspace.google.com/products/jamboard/). Even the promotional images look similar. Also, while not explicitly targeting collaboration, v3 of the Remarkable firmware has added an endless canvas feature which has been nice.
dgreensp 4y ago
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.
friedman23 4y ago
I want to know why this thing was automatically added to my menu bar
danhau 4y ago
Alternative title: Apple launches Freeform: a powerful new app designed to boost Apple Pencil sales
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
I just really object to a company installing software on my computer that is not OS related without my permission.
verisimilidude 4y ago
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.
- timeon 4y ago
  It is also for people who do not need collaborative feature so creating account and running web-page like FigJam or Miro is overkill.
russellbeattie 4y ago
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.
rickdeckard 4y ago
A free-of-charge tool... The amount of seemingly acceptable market-distorting behavior we've all grown into is quite baffling to me. I wonder if Philipp Morris could have offered free office space to companies in the 80s with access being restricted to smokers only...
- Longhanks 4y ago
  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".
  - rickdeckard 4y ago
    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.
pomatic 4y ago
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?
chadlavi 4y ago
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.
- aussiesnack 4y ago
  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.
- tedd4u 4y ago
  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.
itsjustmath 4y ago
Nice collection here: https://infinitecanvas.tools/ https://infinitecanvas.tools/
egonschiele 4y ago
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.
Alifatisk 4y ago
Am I right to assume that this will only be accessible from the ecosystem only?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Ruq 4y ago
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"?
pier25 4y ago
This is really a way to hook people on paid iCloud accounts.
015a 4y ago
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.
peterchane 4y ago
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.
jjthejjj 4y ago
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.
fattybob 4y ago
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!)

367 points by dsego 4y ago

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?

Spooky23 4y ago
The big platform players all need their own spin on Mural. They probably think it’s like Figma for business. With hybrid work a thing, everyone is trying to win vertically integrated online collaboration. Eventually they’ll sell a wall mount ipad.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  Never underestimate the ability of Apple to completely miss an obvious corporate product.
  - chid 4y ago
    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)
- Someone 4y ago
  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 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.
rpastuszak 4y ago
It seems to look like an infinite canvas, which reminds me of the excellent Concepts app (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/concepts/id560586497 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/concepts/id560586497). Handwriting support in Concepts doesn't feel as good as Notes or Procreate so I imagine it'll be better in Freeform.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  https://excalidraw.com https://excalidraw.com 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.
  - mandmandam 4y ago
    Nothing too substantive to contribute here, but yeah I really love Excalidraw. It's exemplary, and I really hope it grows.
    - rpastuszak 4y ago
      Same, it’s simple, open and snappy as f*ck
  - twobitshifter 4y ago
    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.
  - oarsinsync 4y ago
    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!
Twisell 4y ago
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.
- tmalsburg2 4y ago
  My 4yo doesn’t think that Notes is primarily text based. It also has an infinite canvas and you can share a note with others to collaborate.
  - Twisell 4y ago
    Unless I'm wrong it's not a vector canvas once saved you can edit shape individually, also you can include media inside this canvas.

jasode 4y ago

>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.

amelius 4y ago
Yes, it's an egocentric company, that's for sure, but most people here already know that.
achow 4y ago
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.
zitterbewegung 4y ago
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.

maegul 4y ago

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.

shafyy 4y ago

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 :-)

achow 4y ago
> ..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.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I think it’s as simple as: a whiteboard has a frame of reference. An infinite canvas doesn’t.
  - achow 4y ago
    The question is if you are in front of 2 miles wide by 100 ft high whiteboard, would your letter size differ?
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      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.

felixthehat 4y ago

Seems very much like Figma's FigJam https://www.figma.com/figjam/ https://www.figma.com/figjam/

marban 4y ago

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...

interpol_p 4y ago
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
- smoldesu 4y ago
  What's your gripe with OneNote? I used it a few years ago and remember enjoying it much more than Apple Notes, especially on desktop.
  - kyawzazaw 4y ago
    it somehow doesn't even ink to text on my iPad
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      It did on my Surface, for what that's worth.
  - PascLeRasc 4y ago
    Typing latency is measured in the tens of seconds.
    - szdva 4y ago
      Must be using the same GUI framework that they use for Office apps on Windows ;-)

codeisawesome 4y ago

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.

twobitshifter 4y ago
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
njitram 4y ago
Surprisingly enough, notes does have snap to shape the feature, really weird decision to NOT have it in Freeform unfortunately
chrisandchris 4y ago
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.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > 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.

eduction 4y ago

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.

chrisandchris 4y ago
Probably, yes. 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.
- Arubis 4y ago
  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.
- FeloniousHam 4y ago
  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.
  - ubercow13 4y ago

user3939382 4y ago

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?

mythhouse 4y ago

Looks like this lets me use apple pen on my ipad. I wish i could do that on obsidian canvas.

xnx 4y ago

I wish collaborative outliners (Workflowy, Dynalist, etc.) were a fraction as popular as whiteboarding apps.

rpdillon 4y ago
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.

lizardactivist 4y ago

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.

ezfe 4y ago
lol
buffington 4y ago
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/ 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.
- lizardactivist 4y ago
  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.
  - buffington 4y ago
    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.

willyt 4y ago

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.

saos 4y ago

Man I wish Apple bought out Figma instead.

rvz 4y ago
Just for Apple to shut it down for other platforms except for Apple platforms just like they did for Dark Sky? No thanks and no deal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

naltroc 4y ago

canvas zeitgeist? Yesterday there were two posts about two other apps featuring an infinite canvas, and today has the same thing but by Apple. hn is canvasing us for canvases

chid 4y ago
I saw the obsidian one but what was the other? https://obsidian.md/canvas https://obsidian.md/canvas
- jonas-w 4y ago
  Maybe they are talking about https://d2lang.com/tour/intro/ https://d2lang.com/tour/intro/
  - chid 4y ago
    doesn't quite make sense given they are so different - there was this again recently posted though https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096668

nowherebeen 4y ago

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.

lolive 4y ago

Just after Obsidian releases Canvas. Coincidence? I don't think so... https://obsidian.md/canvas https://obsidian.md/canvas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34066824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34066824

reaperducer 4y ago
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?
- Bishonen88 4y ago
  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.
  - lolive 4y ago
    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.
dagmx 4y ago
Freeform was announced in June at WWDC. It most definitely was in development before that date as well. Even this press release you’re replying to was released before Obsidian’s canvas was announced.
timjver 4y ago
Whether or not it is a coincidence depends on whether Obsidian planned this. Apple isn't going to base their release schedule on something like this.

s1mon 4y ago

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.

danielvaughn 4y ago
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.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  I've also had this experience; it's a major UX fail. I uninstalled Numbers/Pages after it.
  - ezfe 4y ago
    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.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Neither one is good, but at least Excel warns me formatting will be lost. I wish they'd warn you on first operation that CSV can't handle, and ask.

Hippocrates 4y ago

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.

killerdhmo 4y ago
Have you tried the new notes in 16.2 / 13.1? It’s gotten a lot faster!
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Yes, it looks like to rewrote the collaboration syncing code for Freeform and it helped Notes a lot. Probably improved collab in iWork apps, too.

TrickyRick 4y ago

Already submitted... so many times https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33973540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33973540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33985553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33985553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33980763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33980763

MexicanJoe 4y ago

Is this not just Good Notes? https://www.goodnotes.com/ https://www.goodnotes.com/

kinnth 4y ago

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.

fattybob 4y ago

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.

whoopsie 4y ago

No dark mode. Why?

jjcm 4y ago
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.

LunarAurora 4y ago

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... [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-whiteboard/digital-whiteboard-app https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-whit... [2] https://workspace.google.com/products/jamboard/ https://workspace.google.com/products/jamboard/ [3] https://www.figma.com/figjam/ https://www.figma.com/figjam/ [4] The others are MURAL/invision at 2B (not including Lucid)

crazygringo 4y ago
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".
- LunarAurora 4y ago
  > Their apps seem to be successful as intended. OK. Good to know. I wasn’t really trying to give any definitive conclusion. It is just that I don't see them mentioned, that is all.
newaccount74 4y ago
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.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

We'll have to see how this works. It may be a good fit for the team I'm working with. I'm writing a native iOS app. Everyone has iPhones (It's an iPhone app, basically). The Azure guy has a PC, but everyone else uses Macs. I can't get the team to use Slack (the Azure guy does, but everyone else wants to use Messages, which is a huge PitA). Sometimes, we need to find the tool that everyone uses; not the one that fits our worldview.

smoldesu 4y ago
> everyone else wants to use Messages Why? Messages seems horribly equipped to handle professional communications, especially compared to options like Slack.
- SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
  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...
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  In reply to both: Yes. I agree. Messages sucks. But most of the team is nontechnical, and don’t want to use Slack. I am not in a position to insist otherwise. Messages works OK for most quick conversations, but is no good for anything of technical substance. So I am keeping my options open for alternative mediums that the team will actually use.

eternalban 4y ago

Need OS X advice here: am happy with 11.5.x on M1. Any issue upgrading to the tip 16.x as required for this software? Same q for iPad as well. /tia

speedgoose 4y ago

A collaboration tool stuck to Apple ‘s operating systems is pretty useless.

colinhb 4y ago

At first glance it looks like Muse[1], built by Heroku alum, caught Apple's attention. [1]: https://museapp.com https://museapp.com

CA0DA 4y ago

"Apple Whiteboard"

exabrial 4y ago

Requires Ventura so I'm out. 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. It's Ventura that's a problem, not my hardware.

karaterobot 4y ago

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.

rib3ye 4y ago
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.
- chadlavi 4y ago
  to be fair, Google's (terrible) version of this predates figjam by quite a bit, and maybe even predates Miro.
LegitShady 4y ago
>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

thebeardisred 4y ago

I'm surprised at the lack of comparisons to the Jamboard (https://workspace.google.com/products/jamboard/ https://workspace.google.com/products/jamboard/). Even the promotional images look similar. Also, while not explicitly targeting collaboration, v3 of the Remarkable firmware has added an endless canvas feature which has been nice.

dgreensp 4y ago

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.

friedman23 4y ago

I want to know why this thing was automatically added to my menu bar

danhau 4y ago

Alternative title: Apple launches Freeform: a powerful new app designed to boost Apple Pencil sales

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

I just really object to a company installing software on my computer that is not OS related without my permission.

verisimilidude 4y ago

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.

timeon 4y ago
It is also for people who do not need collaborative feature so creating account and running web-page like FigJam or Miro is overkill.

russellbeattie 4y ago

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.

rickdeckard 4y ago

A free-of-charge tool... The amount of seemingly acceptable market-distorting behavior we've all grown into is quite baffling to me. I wonder if Philipp Morris could have offered free office space to companies in the 80s with access being restricted to smokers only...

Longhanks 4y ago
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".
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  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.

pomatic 4y ago

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?

chadlavi 4y ago

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.

aussiesnack 4y ago
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.
tedd4u 4y ago
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.

itsjustmath 4y ago

Nice collection here: https://infinitecanvas.tools/ https://infinitecanvas.tools/

egonschiele 4y ago

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.

Alifatisk 4y ago

Am I right to assume that this will only be accessible from the ecosystem only?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Ruq 4y ago

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"?

pier25 4y ago

This is really a way to hook people on paid iCloud accounts.

015a 4y ago

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.

peterchane 4y ago

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.

jjthejjj 4y ago

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.

fattybob 4y ago

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!)