During last year’s WWDC keynote, Apple spent a surprising amount of time talking about a set of features focused on the idea of collaboration. The company tried to tie together a few disparate ideas, such as working on documents together in apps like Pages, Keynote and Numbers with pre-existing communication features in Messages and FaceTime.
The clear message was that Apple was interested in collaborative desktop environments like Microsoft Teams and Google Docs. But given these long-running alternatives with, if not devoted userbases, at least entrenched userbases, there’s a question of who exactly are these features aimed at?
That said, as someone working in a small environment populated entirely by those in Apple’s ecosystem, I seem like the perfect candidate for such features. But compared to what other companies are offering, Apple’s foray feels a bit sloppy and stuck-up, and my experiences using it have been far from smooth.
Tidy
Recently, I was collaborating with my colleague Jason Snell on Apple’s latest Macs. (You can check out my M2 Pro Mac mini review.) Jason shared a draft of his MacBook Pro review with me via Dropbox, a workflow we’ve used many times in the past. Meanwhile, I attempted 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 was the collaborate feature not working properly – I repeatedly pressed a Copy Link button in Finder that put absolutely nothing on my clipboard – but it ended up messing up my own copy of the review, which suddenly stopped reliably syncing between my MacBook Air and the Mac mini test machine. Instead, I had to browse and use BBEdit’s built-in file compare feature to painstakingly apply edits paragraph by paragraph and ensure I had the most recent text from the copies on both machines. . This happened several times until I came back and didn’t share the document with Jason, at which point it suddenly started syncing again on my Macs.
I have the impression that the synchronization between several people and synchronization between different devices of a person does not work well together at the moment. And yet, it’s something third parties like Dropbox have been able to handle for a few years, and web-based solutions like Google Docs need not worry at all. Relying on these features for serious collaboration is definitely a tough sell when they struggle with this core functionality.
My attempts to collaborate on recent projects involving Apple’s new Macs have not gone as planned.
Dan Moren
Freeform can cost you
One of the key branded collaboration features from last year’s keynote didn’t ship 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 Apple Pencil, and even embed files.
But Freeform also has a lot of rough edges that make it not quite ready for everyday use. Until recently, a bug caused content entered via Apple Pencil to disappear on other platforms. (This was reportedly fixed in last week’s iOS 16.3 and macOS 13.2 updates.) Meanwhile, the Mac version of the app, which I was using at one point to share a Freeform board with myself on my iPad and another user on their iPad, ended up crashing every two minutes while in use.
One of my biggest frustrations with Freeform is the aforementioned file embedding feature, which I found disappointing. For example, in a table, I wanted to try putting an editable table in the document, similar to how Pages lets you embed a mini spreadsheet, but Freeform can only add a link to (or a copy complete of) a spreadsheet, which displays a thumbnail and is not editable in Freeform itself. Similarly, trying to embed a PDF simply inserts a thumbnail and link to the file, rather than letting users view and annotate PDFs directly in the table.
It feels like Freeform is promising, but its current iteration is far from stable, and it’s hard to imagine anyone using it for serious collaboration efforts.
The notes you don’t play
That’s not to say that all of Apple’s attempts at collaboration are bad. In fact, there are a few features that I was quite happy with. For example, while Jason and I were working on our Mac reviews together, we shared a Numbers spreadsheet of reference data so we could both fill in the appropriate numbers. It ended up working just fine and I didn’t encounter any major issues. (Although I was constantly prompted in my iMessage chat with him to see the latest edits to our document, which I found a bit annoying.)
In my opinion, however, where collaboration across Apple’s platforms has really succeeded is in the Notes app. I know! It surprises me as much as anyone, but over the past few years the humble app that was once defined by its skeuomorphic yellow lined paper background and Marker Felt font has become a powerhouse of Apple’s lineup. Recently, it even got the ability to show, live, where other users’ cursors are while they’re editing a shared note.
I use shared notes with my wife to track many home 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. For me, it’s the perfect use of collaboration, as it’s a quick and easy gap that doesn’t require us to download a separate app. If I want to co-write an entire document, I’d probably use Google Docs, but if I just want to share a notebook with friends, Notes is where it’s at. That’s something Freeform and the rest of Apple’s collaboration features could probably learn from.
