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?

  • Agent641
    2·
    8 hours ago

    I love them. I have some extremely hefty figma canvasses for software workflow mockups.

    I also use them for reading documents. Not permanent storage, but when I need to reference 12 service manuals at the same time, I dump them into an infinite canvas so I can easily slide between them. Sure, I could open 12 PDFs, but I get confused navigating tabs by pdf names, especially when the filenames are incomprehensible document numbers.