I work in web development and over the past five years or so I’ve seen these “infinite canvas” or “whiteboard” applications proliferate over the years. A short concentrated list of these things would include miro, freeform, and obsidian. A longer list would include things like Confluence whiteboards and even things like Figma.
These applications always seem like they’re the preferred tool of people who love to navel gaze and go on long monologues about software development frameworks and “user experiences”.
I find navigating these tools to be frustrating and trying to “work collaboratively” in them to be even worse.
I understand some of them for some domains. (Figma I’ve grown to tolerate specifically because it seems to have a reasonable use case.)
But:
What is with these things, and why are there so many of them now?
Do they help anyone work better?
Do people actually like them, or are they just forced to use them?
If I want to do so textually — useful for very large, automatically-laid-out-diagrams, such as those generated automatically — I’ll use graphviz.
e.g.
foo.dot:
And then:
produces:
XACTLY. Unfortunately, my company won’t accept that as a valid diagramming tool. It must be in lucid’s shit. I’ve built some really cool exploratory tools using graphviz including a logical data dependency graph from database schema using a bit of (g)awk. Could navigate the graph in a browser because I had it spit out HTML.