Freeform: a new app designed for creative collaboration
apple.com
apple.com
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.
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.
If it's free-from-Apple, the software is there to drive or enhance hardware sales.
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.
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.
Software keyboards suck for writing longer texts.
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.
None of those are killer apps.
A killer app is an application that is so unique and so useful that it sells the hardware:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application
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?
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.
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.
MacBook does all these better and the rest of your list too with the exception of Camera, which the iPhone does better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 does have a killer app: The form factor.
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.
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.. :(
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?
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-whit...
[2] https://workspace.google.com/products/jamboard/
[3] https://www.figma.com/figjam/
[4] The others are MURAL/invision at 2B (not including Lucid)
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".
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.
Miro is simple to get started, can be used in every browser for free, and is really nice for collaborative brainstorming sessions.
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.
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
Which OS are you using for OneNote?
(Not just trauma-dumping. Saying this here to say there might be a common tech problem that we can expose)
>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.
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.
https://www.karelia.com/blog/the-long-story-behind-karel.htm...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
There were several other options to do the same thing, but Microsoft added their own that came with the OS.
Facetime is a feature of the Apple ecosystem.
Let's rephrase that: Facetime is arbitrarily limited to the Apple ecosystem by Apple's desire to weaponise it for anti-competitive reasons.
If Apple published the protocol there would be 15 clients on other platforms overnight without Apple lifting a finger.
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.
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.
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.)
I‘ve never used it like that myself though, so no idea if it is actually usable.
This enhances collaboration to the standard of the Apple ecosystem. Many people want to avoid "the Android/Windows/shitty third party app experience".
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?
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.
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.
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.
I’m not sure what work or collaboration app do you see from Apple that exceeds the popular third party ones.
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.
Not only that, it limits collaboration to those running only the newest version of iOS/MacOS.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
FigJam and I believe Freeform don't do this. It's insane how Miro scaled so effectively with base UX issues like this.
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.
Highly vocal users aren’t always the ones you should listen to.
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.
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.
• 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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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
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 wish they'd warn you on first operation that CSV can't handle, and ask.
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.
Not if, like the OP, you open a CSV file first, then hit save.
If you're just editing some values, you can save back to CSV with CTRL+S no problems.
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.
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.
Office warns me my changes will be lost and offers to change to XLSX. Numbers just changes it silently, without warning.
- Drew ( sent from my iPad)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
If something can be used for collaboration, it is be definition collaborative, is it not?
A multi-user tabletop projection system is collaborative, even if it requires everyone to be in the same room using the same device.
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.
Collaboration should be about lowering barriers, not rising them.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
or maybe they do understand, and are self selecting away from people like you...
I'd have a similar reaction to .doc or .docx as well, though at least I can open those files. .pdf is table stakes.
Person wants to work for a company that is willing to pay the cost of tools, and using Apple is a good proxy for this.
Unfortunately in hiring all we have a (frequently imperfect) proxies.
ATS systems usually won't accept a .pages file as a format anyway. It's RTF, TXT, DOC, DOCX and PDF from what I've seen.
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.
Walled gardens exist throughout computing.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
Depends on the job of course.
Do you indicate the format you need to receive?
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.
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.
Sure Pages is readable on every Apple OS, but .docx is readable on almost anything moder, with a loss a loss of formatting or not.
Windows users can't even read some doc versions. Resumes should either be text or pdf. Anything else is a gamble.
Absolutely agree that PDF is the best choice. Readable and correctly renderable by just about everything, and even fixes the problem of missing fonts.
Why would you send your source code instead of your binary?
This just seems crazy. People don’t pdf them first? A .doc CV is equally disgusting in my view.
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.
Libre Office can open mac pages documents.
As a corollary, sharing .7zip or .tar or .rar when a .zip would do just fine are equivalent mistakes.
Mac Spotlight can open and edit PDFs to some extend, including copying and pasting pages to put different PDFs together.
I could see this tool being a decent competitor to something like the google drive suite
I'm utterly astounded that anyone sends a resume in anything other than PDF.
Sometimes employers require .doc or .docx, and that's a disqualifier. For me.
I mean, you could ask them if they could export it to PDF and not just kick them to the curb.
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.
[1]: https://museapp.com
With hybrid work a thing, everyone is trying to win vertically integrated online collaboration. Eventually they’ll sell a wall mount ipad.
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.
Handwriting support in Concepts doesn't feel as good as Notes or Procreate so I imagine it'll be better in Freeform.
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.
It's exemplary, and I really hope it grows.
Excalidraw works with Apple Pencil which is great but doesn’t have snapping and straightening of lines.
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!
And that’s a shame because I also use Obsidian, which has a decent Excalidraw integration.
Also, while not explicitly targeting collaboration, v3 of the Remarkable firmware has added an endless canvas feature which has been nice.
No thanks and no deal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
hn is canvasing us for canvases
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.
Why? Messages seems horribly equipped to handle professional communications, especially compared to options like Slack.
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.
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.
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.
The same thing probably applies to stuff made in this app by Apple.
I wonder if Philipp Morris could have offered free office space to companies in the 80s with access being restricted to smokers only...
You must be very cynical to see this as "market distortion".
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.
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.
Coincidence? I don't think so...
https://obsidian.md/canvas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34066824
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?
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.
Even this press release you’re replying to was released before Obsidian’s canvas was announced.