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?
Yeah, I’ve been noticing people are moving from a spreadsheet or word doc to a “board” of sorts. Microsoft has their own one that gets passed around at my org.
Seems to be a way to make the info more “top level” appropriate easily. Execs don’t want to be bothered with a spreadsheet anymore.