**********Intro**********
In the most recent iOS update, iOS16.2, Apple introduced a brand
new app that can be run on all your Apple computing devices, your iPhone,
iPad and Mac. It’s called Freeform, Apple describe it as a collaborative whiteboard tool,
and it’s actually very good, and in this video, I’m going to show you how to use it.
OK, let’s get into it.
************************Requirements************************
So as I mentioned already, Freeform will work on all your Mac computing devices,
it will work on your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac. In terms of compatibility, your device needs
to be able to run the latest operating system, which would be iOS16.2 and newer on iPhone,
iPadOS16.2 and newer on iPad, and MacOS Ventura 13.1 or newer on Mac. So long as your devices
have been upgraded to that version, not only will Freeform work on those devices,
it will be pre-installed and ready to go on your devices, without you having to do anything.
Depending on how your device is setup, the app might show immediately on your Home Screen,
or you might have to search for the app in the App Library.
For this video, I’m going to focus on the two devices where I believe
Freeform will most likely be used by most people, that’s the iPhone and the iPad,
but I’ll flip over to the Mac also at some point in the video,
so you can see how it looks over there. Credit to Apple, the way they make software these days,
it kind of looks and behaves the same regardless of what device you’re using it on.
Oh, final thing to show you before we truly get into the video. Collaboration
is a key part of the Freeform experience, so one thing you’ll want to double check,
is that Freeform is configured to work with iCloud on your devices, because without this,
you won’t be able to sync Freeform to the cloud, and you therefore won’t be able to collaborate.
On iPhone, head to Settings, tap on your Apple ID, iCloud, then under Apps using iCloud, choose Show
All, and ensure that Freeform is toggled on. Same on iPad, go to Settings, tap on your Apple ID,
then under Apps using iCloud, choose Show All, and ensure that Freeform is toggled
on. It’s almost identical on Mac, go to System Settings, click on your Apple ID, then iCloud,
but here you simply scroll down this page until you see Freeform, and ensure that it’s toggled on.
******************************Getting Started******************************
So I’m going to open up Freeform here on my iPhone, and when you’re opening
it for the first time, you might get a message showing you everything that Freeform can do,
but in general you’re going to open up to a blank board that looks like this. In general,
our main app options are up here at the top, I’ll cover these in detail in a moment,
and then our options for adding content to the board are down here at the bottom.
As we work through the app, you’ll probably start to see how and where this might be useful for you,
but in general, this app is the digital equivalent of bringing a group of people together in a room,
and getting a whiteboard out and working through ideas or plans. That’s how you need to think of
this, so keep that in mind as we work through. You might use this with friends to plan a weekend
away, or you might use this with your partner to plan the decorating of a room of your house,
or you could use this with colleagues to plan out a project. Essentially,
anything where a visual mood board would help you. I’m going to use the example of
using this with friends and family to plan out a holiday or vacation.
So what I’ll do to begin, is here on my iPhone, I’m going to tap this little A button down at the
bottom centre of the screen. We’ll explore this menu in full a bit later, but for now, let’s just
double click on the text box that it’s created. I’ll type in Holiday 2023, and then I’ll tap Done.
Then I’ll single tap on the text box, and down here at the bottom, I’ll tap into the Aa button,
then into the Aa button again in here, and I’ll change the font. Then I’ll tap on the text size
button and I’ll make it bigger, and then I’ll tap on the colour button and change it’s colour.
Then, I’m going to tap on this shapes button. Again, we’ll look at this menu
properly a bit later, but for now I’m going to tap on the search button and type in Sun,
and then I’ll tap on this sun shape to add it in. I’ll tap on it again
and then change the colour, and then position it where I want it to be.
Next, I’m going to tap this ellipsis menu at the top right, and I’m going to choose Rename,
which is going to allow me to give the board we’re working on a name. I’ll call this Holiday 2023.
Before we go any further, with sharing being such a key part of the Freeform experience,
I’m going to share this board with someone right away, so that we can see how this
looks from both perspectives, the owner of the board, and someone else who has access to it.
If I tap this share icon up at the top,
this is where we can include other people to help collaborate on the board with us.
Firstly, if I tap on the text that says “only invited people can edit”,
we can choose how we’d like people to be able to work on the board with us. We can restrict
access to only those people who we’ve invited, or make it public to anyone with the link. We
can make the board a view only board, which could be good if you’re using this to share information
rather than have other people collaborate with you. This could be great for building a digital
community board or something like that. And we can restrict whether other people can invite
other people. We would then choose how we’d like to share the link, and go ahead and share.
Over here on my iPad, I’m logged in as the person I just shared with, and I’ve accepted
the invitation, so I can now access the board, and work on it in time with the person who created
it. If I tap on this image up here, this is the sharing menu, and I can see information about who
else is working on this board, we could message, or jump on a call or even a facetime call, so you
can literally collaborate and communicate with people in real time, all from within this app.
Right, let’s go back to the iPhone, and start adding some content to the board. This little
button with text down in the bottom left is the Sticky Note option. If I tap on that,
I get a yellow sticky note on the screen, which I can move around and make bigger,
all the usual stuff that you’d expect to be able to do. If I double-tap into the sticky note,
I can add some text. Now I’ve been using these as kind of place-holders, you can of course use
them however you like. But I’m going to type in ‘places to eat’, and use this to mark out
an area of the board where I’m going to include information about food for while we’re away.
If I tap this little Aa button, I can change the font size. The button to the right of that allows
me to make the text bold, italic, underlined and struck through. The next button along allows me to
change the alignment of the text, and finally this button allows me to use Bullets. Tap Done when
you’re finished editing, but then if I tap once on the sticky note, instead of double-tapping,
there are some options relevant to the sticky note itself. I can change it’s colour using the
colour button here. The text button allows me to access most of the text formatting options,
without having to select the text. This button with the plus icon is a duplicate button, and
then a handy button to be aware of once you know about this is the back-pointing arrow up at the
top of the screen, this is the undo button. The red bin or trash can is to delete the note, and
then this ellipsis button gives me some additional options. I can change the position on the board,
bringing the item forwards or backwards. This will obviously come in handy as we add more to
the board. I can cut, copy, duplicate or lock the item. I can copy the style of this item,
then paste that style onto another item if I wish. And I can add a description, which is then used
in accessibility tools like voice over, so if you know you’re working on a board with someone
who may benefit from accessibility tools, you may wish to add a written description here.
Let’s add some more content. I’m going to open Safari, and I’ve got the website up for a very
highly rated restaurant in the area where we’re planning our trip. So, I’m going to copy the link
to the clipboard, then bounce back to Freeform. I’m going to tap the little image button in the
lower right of the screen, and then choose Link. I’m then going to paste the link in, and choose
Insert. I’m then going to position the link until I’m happy with where it’s sitting on the board.
Now, this is good, but it’s not very visual. So what I might do is go and grab a screenshot
from the Google listing, and add that in. Take the screenshot as you’d usually take a
screenshot on your device, then in Freeform, tap the image button in the bottom right once again,
then choose Photos or Videos, and select the screenshot that you just
captured. I can position it around on the whiteboard as I wish, and resize it.
If I tap on it, notice the options that appear down here at the bottom of the
screen. I can use the image button to revert the image to it’s original size,
or replace it. I can use the crop button to crop the image, which might actually be quite useful,
to get rid of some of the junk that we don’t need in the screenshot.
The little eye icon allows you to focus on just the image,
and view it in it’s own window. You then have duplicate and the bin like before,
but then in the ellipsis menu, there are some more options. We can toggle a shadow on or off,
we can make the corners round if we wish, and we can constrain the proportions.
Now I’m not sure if it’s totally clear that the link here is connected to this screenshot,
so I’m actually going to move it, and then use the
options to bring it forward and sit it on top of the screenshot.
Then I’m going to tap this shape button down at the bottom, and you can see that we’ve got tonnes
of shapes and icons that we can choose from to add in, I think Apple have claimed there are
around 700 here. They’re split out by category up at the top, or you can use the magnifying
glass to search for one. I’m going to tap on the arrow. You can then use your fingers on screen to
make it bigger and move it around. The green dot allows you to change the thickness of the arrow,
the sharpness of the point, all that good stuff, and you can use two fingers to rotate it. This
is a bit fiddly, it would be good if Apple could include a slightly more accessible way
of doing this in the future, like flipping the arrow using a rotate button perhaps.
Tapping on the arrow will then allow you to change the colour of it, or change the outline colour and
style of it, or change any text that you may have written on it. I’m going to position the
arrow over here, and then I’m going to tap on this text box down in the bottom centre of the screen.
I’m going to position it just next to the arrow, and then I’ll double tap to add some text.
The text is a bit small, so I’ll then tap on the text box,
and tap into the text size button and make it larger. Also, if you tap on the text button,
then tap this Aa button, you can change the font, so I’ll choose something that I
think looks a bit better. I think I might also change the colour, and make it Bold.
Now, I’m quite happy with this little cluster of content that I’ve made here, but I’d like
to be able to move it all around the board in one go. So what I can do, is I can tap once on
the screenshot, but then keeping that finger down, I’ll use another finger to tap on the other items.
Notice how it selects all of them. I can then tap this button down in the options at the bottom,
and I can use the various different align options if I want to, or I can press the Group button, to
group all these items together. I can then select and move the whole collection of items in one go.
And that’s kind of the core of how Freeform works. Clearly, if this were a real example, I’d now add
loads more content, and I could make different sections of the board, perhaps one for places to
go out for walks, one for nice beaches we could visit, whatever works for my particular project.
************************PDF Shoutout************************
By the way, if you prefer to have content like this in a written format,
there’s a PDF to accompany this video, and you can access it by becoming a channel member,
where for a small monthly fee, you’ll get access to all video PDFs moving forward, plus the growing
library of old ones. Just hit the Join button on this video, and follow the instructions.
This pen icon down here is the scribble button that allows you to use your finger
in the same way that you would an Apple Pencil on your iPad. I’ll be honest,
I’ve never gotten on with this on iPhone, but it’s there if you want to use it. Interestingly,
the highlighter pen is gone, replaced with this weird oil painting,
shape creation tool which I really don’t find very helpful, but there you go.
What I think is worth mentioning are the other options here in the image button.
Insert From allows you to choose a file from the Files app. This could of course be an image,
but it could even be a PDF, allowing you to insert entire files or documents in,
which is pretty awesome. You could also input an audio file,
or a document like a word processing, presentation or spreadsheet.
Link allows you to insert a link, we did this earlier, and this does of course work very well
with web links. But here’s another way we can use this. If I open the Maps app, and find a
location that I’d like to include in the board, I can then tap the share button within Maps,
then choose Copy. Then in Freeform, in the Link box, I can paste the link I just copied,
and it will insert a Map snippet, which when clicked on, will open up the location in Maps.
Scan allows you to scan a document in, so if you’ve got a paper document or a written
whiteboard or something like that, you could use this to scan it into your Freeform session.
Camera allows you to take a picture or video and insert that using your iPhone’s camera.
And Photos or Videos allows you to access your photo library,
and insert an existing photo or video.
And of course, all the time that we’re doing this, our board is being updated in the cloud,
and is reflected on our other devices, and the devices of those who we’re collaborating
with. Here’s the board so far on the iPad of the person I’ve shared with.
And here’s the board so far on a MacBook Pro.
Actually, let me show you the main benefit of using this on the iPad,
in my opinion. The integration with the Apple pencil. I can grab my Apple pencil,
and annotate anything on the board using the pencil tool.
Actually, while we’re here on the iPad, notice that the fundamentals of the app
are almost identical here as they are on the iPhone. The only real difference is
that the controls which were at the bottom of the iPhone, where we would add in things
like sticky notes and text, are up at the top here on the iPad. Everything else is the same.
One last thing to show you here, and for this I’m going to create a new board. And in this board,
I’m going to insert an image of a football pitch that I grabbed from the web, soccer pitch if
you’re watching this from the other side of the pond. I’m going to then tap on the image, tap on
the ellipsis icon, and then choose Lock. This image is now locked in place, and if I move my
finger around on it, I’ll move the board, not the image. So now, I can bring up the pen option here
on my iPad, and I can annotate over the top of this image. Perfect for sports coaches as you can
see, but I’m sure you can imagine that there are tonnes of situations where this would be useful.
**************************Proper Weekly**************************
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************************************Extra Options************************************
So that’s how we would create and manage a Freeform board. Obviously,
you’ll need to spend some time playing around with
this to figure out how this is going to work for you and your requirements,
but hopefully this has shown you just how much potential there is here to create visual boards.
But there are some other options that we need to take a look at before we finish.
In the ellipsis menu, we’ve got some options relating to the board. We can rename it,
duplicate it, or favourite it. We can also use Find to search for
things within the board, which could be good in a very information dense board.
We can hide the grid, or bring it back in. No option to choose lines
rather than grid from what I can see, which would be good in a future update perhaps.
We can export the board as a PDF. This is a bit disappointing,
as most of the interactive elements didn’t work when I did this, videos wouldn’t play,
links wouldn’t load for example, and it would be great if those options remained in the PDF.
And then finally, you can print the board out if you need to.
If I tap back a page, you can view all of your boards, and in here you can sort, group, search,
all the usual stuff you’d expect to be able to do. Back another page, and you can view
boards using filters, such as shared boards only, favourited boards, and recently deleted boards.
Lastly, I mentioned earlier in the video that I would show you how this looks on iPhone,
iPad and Mac, well here’s the board that we’ve been working on, over on my Mac. As you can see,
the app is identical, but you have more options in some of the menus. For example, the folder button
here is going to let me select any file from my computer to add into the board. And if I tap on
the image button, I can add in sketches or images from a connected device, like an iPhone or iPad.
******End******
So there you go, that’s Freeform on the iPhone, iPad and Mac. It’s a really great piece of
software, and I can absolutely see how, if you’re the kind of person who likes to plan things out in
a more visual manner, and collaborate with other people, you could get some great work done with
this. What about you, what do you think you might use this for? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.