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?

  • okwhateverdude@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    6 days ago

    I hate these tools. They are all terrible and full of friction. So much pointing and clicking and zooming out and back in. They require so much effort for so little pay off. And they constantly nag you about features you dgaf about. I just wanna draw some boxes, put some text in them and connect them with lines, ffs.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      5·
      6 days ago

      I just wanna draw some boxes, put some text in them and connect them with lines, ffs.

      If I want to do so textually — useful for very large, automatically-laid-out-diagrams, such as those generated automatically — I’ll use graphviz.

      e.g.

      foo.dot:

      digraph {
A->B
B->C
B->D
C->A
}

      And then:

      $ sfdp -Tpng foo.dot >foo.png

      produces:

      • okwhateverdude@lemmy.world
        2·
        6 days ago

        XACTLY. Unfortunately, my company won’t accept that as a valid diagramming tool. It must be in lucid’s shit. I’ve built some really cool exploratory tools using graphviz including a logical data dependency graph from database schema using a bit of (g)awk. Could navigate the graph in a browser because I had it spit out HTML.

    • aesthelete@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      6 days ago

      This has been my experience as well. Designers love to slop it up in them because there’s no versioning or any way to tell what something looked like when it was actually developed. It’s seemingly impossible to set and maintain scope in them. Figma has some versioning support, but it’s probably the worst of all of them from a “which board are you even talking about?” perspective because they have 8000 C&P’d Figma boards all of which contain similar things and the links are 1500 character URLs with a bunch of UUIDs in them.