I’m confused. Of course it doesn’t send an image when you share. It sends a link that allows another Freeform user to open the (now shared) board and collaborate. If you want to send an image of a board, take an image of a board first (i.e., screenshot), then share the image.
And sharing from photos to Freeform? Why would you want to? Just drag a photo from the photos app to the board, or use the photo picker in the Freeform tool bar.
“Freeform” is the perfect name for this app–perfect for brainstorming ideas and thoughts before trying to connect anything. Apps like MindNode, which is great, still forces a structure on your thinking. Freeform is like paper in not having that structure but with all the benefits of being digital. I like it.
Miro is the Paid for app which seems closest. It can be quite expensive across a whole company.
You can group objects but I don’t know if that will accomplish what you want.
On Mac: Hold down the command key and select multiple objects, then right-click and select group. I don’t know if this works with scribbling.
It reads like you would like to use it almost like a scrap book with cut-outs of your PDF pages. If I am understanding what you’re explaining, I’d also like that. That’s kind of how I use GoodNotes. Pulling together a scraps of information into one notebook. But the Freeform design seems like it would be more useful than the notebook model.
Just think of what John Nash of A Beautiful Mind could have done with this.
Check out https://museapp.com/ for a more card-based and feature rich (and more expensive) canvas type app.
Welcome to the forum. Is Muse a part of your workflow?
Yes — Thanks for posting. Which size iPad are you using?
I’ve used it in the idea phase of writing, though not so much now I don’t have an ipad. It’s very nicely designed software.
Muse has you holding a finger on the screen when you want to switch between those two pencil modes. I’d like to see other apps adopt it. Most apps aren’t as committed to requiring the pencil to be useful, though.
Probably because relatively few people have a pencil when compared to the number of iPads in circulation.
With the recent release of freeform in the latest update delivered to iPad, Mac and iPhone, I think we have in our hand a great visual thinking tool. We have an unlimited canvas and easy to use tools to doodle, draw, sketch and visualize anything we are trying to learn and organize.
The power of doodling to enhance knowledge recall and understanding have been shown: Drawing and doodling can help you learn science: study
Personally, using this tool along with others like Curio will create interesting ways to learn new things. I just ordered some books related to visual thinking. I tried to use the app “Concepts” due to the infinite canvas, but it had too many tools and I felt lost attempting to use it. Freeform, on the other hand, is really intuitive and simple to use.
What about you? What do you think?
I’m going to suggest two great books on the topic:
Wish you could just copy/paste over from Miro. I don’t have an extremely large board there, but it would be nice to expedite the migration for testing purposes. I like the idea of having this feature in a local app vs. a PWA. Hopefully can mess with it over the holidays. My main usage at this point is a series of reference photos for various sketching projects.
Freeform seems like a pretty good app for the genre. The price is right. I think it will be more than good enough for many Apple users.
It’s strange to me that Nebo rarely comes up in discussions like these. I have been using it for years and it consistently gets better. I’m going to stick with Nebo. The interface, pricing model, modularity and cross platform capabilities are real strengths.
I use Goodnotes. What are the advantages of nebo?
Nebo: Terrific hand writing/printing translation, integrates sketch/diagrams very well with hand written notes, a minimalistic UI but still has a lot of power, good PDF markup tools, great equations writer (I don’t use it but would have loved something like that 2 or 3 decades ago). For me, it provides the easiest endless canvas for note making on the iPad. I have written 2000-3000 word pieces with it using the Apple Pencil and then flipped the whole thing it into text with a couple of pen taps. I have a form of free-hand bullet journal in an endless canvass that has gotten turned into a mindmap of sorts over the past year.
Finally, got to read your review. Nice write-up!
@Denny I’d missed your review until @iPersuade posted about it. It seems you’re planning to use Freeform as a sort of project manager. From your write up I’m guessing that’s because you’re a design person and you’ll be able to scribble designs in the file as you go, rather than having to file project manager / task info in one place and keep ideas and designs in another, is that right? It’s an interesting use case and I could see it being quite useful (except for the versioning issue with attachments - that sets off alarm bells for me!).
I have a pencil and may use it a bit. But yes, with at least one client I plan to use it as a sort of hub, visual dropbox for files and current notes on his website updates and promotional print projects. So, yeah, a central location where he and I can work from. Hopefully Apple changes the way attached files work in terms of changes/versions so that’s definitely an issue to be aware of. Alarm bells warranted!