Discourse map!

Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 15, 2022 at 08:48 AM

Nah, it really did (does!). People don’t realise that the underlying Numbers concept is precisely that: a gigantic blank object-oriented canvas (with no apparent limits, according to my own experimentation). I’ve already read the MacStories review, and the more I read, the more it made me smile, especially the phrase “The app is easy to use and impressively feature-rich for a new release.” There’s nothing essentially new about it – Numbers has done almost everything (possibly everything; I’ll have to make a detailed comparison) that Freeform does for years.

I was also amused by the comparison with Notes – Freeform’s DNA has much more in common with Numbers than with Notes. If you drag objects around, you soon discover that a Numbers backdrop is essentially unlimited.

But it appears that very few people use Numbers in any depth. I’ve always loved it because its whole approach to spreadsheets is so much friendlier than Excel’s.

It’s worth remarking that we’ve been using it in the business as an internal whiteboarding/brainstorming tool for quite a while. Freeform is essentially just Numbers, but by default, the blank Numbers template automatically dumps a spreadsheet object in the canvas. You can place every kind of object in there (including shapes, rich test, sketches) and just like Freeform, it’s not great on linking (although you can create links with lines, with or without arrows).

The backward step in Freeform is the lack of access to Freeform files. You can access (and collaborate on) Numbers files in iCloud anytime.

satis wrote:

>
>MadaboutDana wrote:
> >> Apple Numbers already did all this stuff
> >I really don’t think it did.
> >https://www.macstories.net/reviews/freeform-leverages-the-freedom-and-flexibility-of-a-blank-canvas/