White board software

Posted by Edu Nv
Mar 9, 2020 at 02:05 PM

I found out about HyperPlan by reading this thread and I have to say I find a lot of promise in content with structured, custom metadata that can be dynamically visualized.

If all I need is a whiteboard/canvas to draw and sketch I personally prefer to use an actual whiteboard. The OP mentioned he finds them inconvenient, and while it’s true that they are not a mobile solution, I find the dimensions of a large whiteboard (80-120 inches) unbeatable for sense-making. A digital screen equivalent would be much more expensive and generally less responsive. Being able to walk around the whiteboard and engage the body to navigate it spatially adds a lot of cognitive anchors that help me make sense of what I’m whiteboarding. Rocketbook Beacons digitize analogue whiteboard content if I need to archive it and I could even do good handwriting ocr with pen to print.

Besides portability, what good old whiteboards lack are infinite space and dynamic function. For (virtually) infinite space, Concepts is my favourite cross-platform infinite canvas app. It has a beautiful design and a solid performance. It also has layers, infinite undo, and other nice dynamic functions. Zoomnotes is a close second (mac and iOS only), which combines whiteboards with notebook paradigms, and I love that you can embedd and nest whiteboards and notebooks.

But what I’ve been missing from whiteboarding apps is the ability to add metadata to content to create a variety of structured views that can be dynamically updated. Tinderbox and Curio offer some filtering options, but I hadn’t seen anything like HyperPlan before. I see how its current features really fill a gap in existing software. Thought it would certainly be fantastic if it also allowed freely positioning content on a canvas! I’m downloading the trial version and will be exploring it this week.

Andy Brice wrote:
>cards are positioned by properties
>or connections, there is no free layout (yet).
>