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?
I think that the /r/place-style collaborative pixel art thing is neat.
https://placedata.reddit.com/data/final_2023_place.png
To be fair, that is explicitly not infinite canvas — it has finite dimensions — but there have been derived programs with infinite bounds that work the same way to do pixel art.
It sounds like the software you’re using is intended for some kind of idea organization team stuff, though. For that, it doesn’t sound like it’s a great paradigm to me, but I also don’t spent a lot of time using software of that sort.
I’ve used visual programming languages. These use flowcharts to represent data flow, are often used for signal processing stuff. Same kind of idea. My general feeling is that that doesn’t really scale up to large problems — you wind up wasting way too much time trying to navigate around the thing. It’s a quick and intuitive way to view very small things, though it still isn’t my preferred approach; I’d rather use text.