Image: Andy Wolber/TechRepublic
It took till late 2022, however now all three main platform makers supply collaborative drafting board apps — or, as I like to consider these, digital drawing options to napkins, notebooks and chalkboards.
Apple Freeform, Google Jamboard and Microsoft Whiteboard, every defined briefly under, all can help you draw and kind on a digital rectangular formed area. This type of unstructured sketching helps many individuals discover concepts or make clear ideas. When drawing with different individuals, these visible instruments might assist encapsulate or clarify important factors and sequences.
As distant work turns into more and more frequent, flip to those drawing instruments when you might want to scribble and present individuals one thing that could be tough to explain with phrases. Each of those drawing methods pairs nicely with the respective platform’s video-conferencing system, too: Freeform with FaceTime, Jamboard with Google Meet, and Whiteboard with Microsoft Teams. When you’re completed with a drawing, it’s possible you’ll export your board, both as a picture (Google Jamboard and Microsoft Whiteboard) or PDF (Apple Freeform and Google Jamboard) for long-term reference.
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Drawing along with Apple Freeform
Apple Freeform, an app included as a part of an iOS, iPadOS and macOS methods replace in mid-December 2022, offers a flexible visible collaboration area, with help not just for drawn traces and typed textual content but in addition insertion of a variety of photos, information and shapes.
On iPhone, it’s possible you’ll draw traces with a finger, whereas on iPad it’s possible you’ll use an Apple Pencil or different supported stylus. Freeform lets you choose and insert shapes, which embrace not solely geometric shapes, but in addition individuals, gadgets, symbols and extra.
Freeform enables you to leverage the capabilities of your Apple gadgets, as proven in Figure A. On an iPhone or iPad, it’s possible you’ll use the digicam to both take a photograph or scan a doc and add it as an merchandise into your Freeform file.
Figure A
Apple Freeform can leverage distinctive options of gadgets. Here, the drawing instruments in Freeform on an iPad Mini are used to create a sketch that may then be inserted into Freeform on a MacBook Air.
People who use a macOS system alongside an iPhone or iPad might select to take a photograph, scan a doc or add a sketch utilizing a kind of close by gadgets from inside Freeform on macOS. The close by machine auto-switches to the chosen mode so long as you could have Bluetooth enabled and are signed in to the identical Apple ID on each methods.
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Drawing along with Google Jamboard
Google Jamboard is offered on the internet and with Apple and Android cell apps. Jamboard enables you to draw with 4 forms of drawing instruments (e.g., a pen, marker, highlighter or brush) in addition to add sticky notes, photos, shapes or textual content. For every of the drawing instrument sorts, it’s possible you’ll choose from a set of six colours: Black, blue, inexperienced, white, yellow or purple. Jamboard additionally gives a laser instrument, which features a lot as a laser pointer may throughout an in-person presentation, with a purple line that disappears quickly after you draw with it.
With Jamboard, collaboration isn’t restricted to a single board. You might add extra frames, such because the frames proven alongside the highest of Figure B. In reality, it’s possible you’ll add as much as a complete of 20 frames inside a single Jamboard file. This functionality might make it simpler to group or kind concepts, equivalent to notes related to totally different elements of a undertaking.
Figure B
Google Jamboard not solely helps all kinds of collaboration instruments on a typical board; it additionally lets you add as much as 20 extra frames.
Alternatively, you may use a sequence of frames as a method to accumulate ideas in a sequence, with the primary body comparable to the primary part, the second with the following and so forth. This multi-frame Jamboard functionality provides you — and your collaborators — nearly a mini-sketchbook of pages by which to seize ideas.
Drawing along with Microsoft Whiteboard
Microsoft Whiteboard works in an online browser or with put in Apple or Android cell apps. Whiteboard offers three pens plus a highlighter instrument, all 4 of which can be personalized to attract traces of assorted sizes and colours.
The system additionally features a ruler that serves each as a guiding edge that can assist you draw a straight line and as a measuring assist for size. The customary menu gives the power so as to add notes, textual content, shapes, reactions, photos and templates. Reactions enable individuals so as to add one in every of eight emoji-like indicators to the board: A star, coronary heart, inexperienced test, purple x, query mark, thumbs up, clapping palms or a smiling face.
The resolution’s distinctive energy, although, will be the variety of built-in templates, as proven in Figure C.
Figure C
Microsoft Whiteboard offers a major variety of templates to help duties equivalent to undertaking planning, brainstorming and studying.
The system gives templates grouped into 9 classes: Brainstorming (5 templates), Problem fixing (eight templates), Design and analysis (one other eight), Strategy (10), Project planning (12), Retrospective (eight), Games (three), Workshops (two) and Learning (19). When you choose a template, the system fills the board with numerous traces, shapes and textual content, which you’ll then delete, transfer or modify as desired.
What’s your expertise with collaborative boards?
While many individuals depend on the options of the three methods above, the digital collaborative board area is kind of aggressive. A brief record of viable distributors may embrace ClickUp, Conceptboard, FigJam, Limnu, Miro, MURAL, Sketchboard, Ziteboard or Zoom. Every a kind of options additionally permits digital visible collaboration.
Chalkboard and dry erase boards on a wall nonetheless retain one key benefit over these digital options: Persistence. In a room, something scribbled on a board stays in view, whether or not you select to have interaction with it or not. That type of ambient show on a board might be fairly helpful when you use these boards to have interaction with concepts over time.
For instance, many mathematicians interviewed in Jessica Wynne’s guide, “Do Not Erase: Mathematicians and Their Chalkboards,” cite the worth of this type of shared, persistent show. I’d like to have the power on a Chromebook, Apple machine or Windows methods to set a collaborative board as a persistent background or wallpaper to approximate a persistent digital various to an precise, bodily, in-room board.
Do you utilize any of the above instruments to attract and kind? Do you have a tendency to make use of these individually, to make notes or work out concepts to your personal reference? Or do you are inclined to share these areas with different individuals? Mention or message me on Mastodon (@awolber) to let me know the way you utilize digital collaborative boards.