During last year’s WWDC keynote, Apple spent a surprising amount of time talking about a set of features that focused on the idea of collaboration. The company tried to tie together a few different ideas, such as working together on documents in apps like Pages, Keynote and Numbers, with pre-existing communication features in Messages and FaceTime.
The clear message was that Apple took a shot at collaborative office environments like Microsoft Teams and Google Docs. But given these long-standing alternatives with, if not dedicated user bases, then at least entrenched user bases, there is a question of who exactly are these features for?
That said, it seems that as someone who works in a small environment populated entirely by those in the Apple ecosystem, I would be the ideal candidate for such features. But compared to what other companies offer, Apple’s foray feels a bit sloppy and taped together, and my experiences using it have been far from smooth.
File away
Recently, I teamed up with my colleague Jason Snell to look at Apple’s latest Macs. (You can see my review of the M2 Pro Mac mini.) Jason shared a draft of his MacBook Pro review with me via Dropbox, a workflow we’ve used many times in the past. In the meantime, I tried to share my own draft review, written in BBEdit, from where it lived in iCloud Drive.
This turned out to be a mistake. Not only did the collaboration feature not work properly—I repeatedly hit a Copy Link button in the Finder that put absolutely nothing on my clipboard—but it ended up interfering with my own copy of the review, which suddenly stopped syncing reliably between my MacBook Air and Mac mini test machine. Instead, I had to go through and use BBEdit’s built-in file comparison feature to painstakingly apply changes on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, making sure I had the most current text from the copies on both machines. This happened several times until I went back and shared the document with Jason, then suddenly it synced again on my Macs.
My impression is that synchronization between several people and syncing between a person’s different devices doesn’t play well at the moment. And yet, it’s something that third parties like Dropbox have been able to handle for a few years, and web-based solutions like Google Docs don’t have to worry about at all. Relying on these features for serious collaboration is certainly a tough sell when they struggle with this basic functionality.
My attempts to collaborate on recent projects regarding Apple’s new Macs did not go as planned.
Dan Moren
Freeform can cost you
One of the most important collaboration features from last year’s keynote didn’t end up shipping until late 2022. Freeform is a new app that launched with macOS Ventura 13.1 and iOS/iPadOS 16.2. It’s meant to be a shared whiteboard where you can enter text and create diagrams, write notes with the Apple Pencil, and even embed files.
But the Freeform also has a lot of rough edges that make it not quite ready for everyday use. Until recently, there was a bug where content entered via Apple Pencil might disappear when on other platforms. (That was reportedly fixed in this past week’s iOS 16.3 and macOS 13.2 updates.) Meanwhile, the Mac version of the app, which I once used to share a Freeform map with myself on my iPad and a another user on their iPad ended up crashing every few minutes during use.
One of my biggest frustrations with Freeform is the aforementioned file embedding feature, which I found underwhelming. For example, in a whiteboard I’d try to insert an editable table into the document, the same way Pages lets you embed a mini spreadsheet, but Freeform can only add a link to (or full copy of) a spreadsheet, which shows a thumbnail and cannot be edited in Freeform itself. Likewise, if you’re trying to embed a PDF, simply insert a thumbnail image and a link to the file, rather than letting users view and markup PDFs directly in the whiteboard.
It feels like Freeform has promise, but its current iteration is far from stable, and it’s hard to imagine anyone using it for serious collaborative efforts.
The notes you don’t play
This is not to say that all of Apple’s attempts at collaboration are bad. In fact, there are a few features that I’ve been quite happy with. For example, when Jason and I were working together on our Mac reviews, we shared a Numbers spreadsheet with benchmark data so we could both fill in the appropriate numbers. It ended up working very well and I didn’t encounter any significant issues. (Though in my iMessage conversation with him I kept getting asked to see the latest changes to our document, which I found a bit annoying.)
In my opinion, where collaboration on Apple’s platforms has really been successful is in the Notes app. I know! It surprises me as much as anyone, but over the past several years, the humble app once defined by its skeuomorphic yellow paper background and Marker Felt font has become a powerhouse in Apple’s lineup. Recently, it even got the ability to show, live, where other users’ markers are while they’re editing a shared note.
I use Shared Notes with my wife to keep track of lots of household and childcare-related activities, and I also use it with my co-hosts on The Rebound podcast to keep show notes and share title suggestions during our recording sessions. To me, it’s the perfect use of collaboration because it’s a quick and easy hole that doesn’t require us to download a separate app. If I want to write an entire document together, I’d probably use Google Docs, but if I just want to share a scratchpad with some friends, Notes is where it’s at. It’s something that Freeform, and the rest of Apple’s collaborative features, could probably stand to learn from.
