Yes, I know, some people don’t like flowcharts. Educator Stephanie Lawless puts it this way: “A little part of me dies every time I have to draw an arrow to a box.”
But there you have it: org charts are useful. I’m not talking about the flowcharts dictated by first-year programming professors. Or organizational charts imposed in a management course. I’m talking about creating flowcharts when you want to trace the flow of a process: it can help you visualize it, grasp it with a better perspective.
In my case, I used it to figure out why a piece of my code was misbehaving. After going through it several times with the debugger, I decided it would be easier to draw the flow of it and watch it for a few minutes. I have Apple Freeform on my Mac. Although Freeform is somewhat limited (especially on the Mac where you can’t use the iPad’s pencil for freehand drawing), it’s still very fast at creating diagrams made up of basic shapes.
Get started with Apple Freeform
To use Apple Freeform, you need an iPhone or iPad with iOS 16.2 or later, or macOS 13.1 or later. I use it on my Mac Studio, but you can use it on any of those devices the same way.
With Apple’s Freeform open, here’s how to create a flowchart.
1. Drag some shapes from the shape picker
The shape picker is the square and circle icon. Just touch it to bring up the Shape Picker options panel.
Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET
As you can see, there are many categories to choose from. I just used the basic shapes for my graphic, but you’re only limited here by your creativity.
Once you click on a shape to add it to your document, you can click on it once and change its color. You can also click a second time and write text inside the shape. The speed of Freeform is that the text size adapts to the shape size as you write it.
2. Draw connecting lines
You will notice that three types of lines are displayed in the shape selector. The first two are the line and arrow tools. They allow you to draw a straight line or an arrow. It’s pretty much the same tool because if you double-click either you can choose whether or not to add an arrowhead to the end and increase or decrease the ‘ladder.
The actual tool used for our flowchart is the spline tool. Indeed, this tool attaches itself to your forms. Notice that when I drag the end of the curve over the square, the square lights up. This is because it attaches to the curve.
Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET
What’s really useful is that once you’ve attached two shapes together, you can move them around and the spline will move with the shape. In the two images below, I simply moved the rounded rectangle. The line moved by itself.
David Gewirtz/ZDNET
3. Adjust the connection line
Once you have decided where to place your shapes and how to connect them, you can edit the connecting line. To do this, click on the middle of the line. You will see a small connection point and a menu appear.
Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET
If you are using the curve option, which is shown above, you can click on the little green dot and move the center of the curve. If you use the right angle option, you can move the point to adjust the course of the lines between the shapes. Here is a more pronounced curve:
Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET
And here is a version where the lines are at right angles:
Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET
And that’s all. When I created my chart, I only included the bare minimum to help me see how the program was performing. It took me ten minutes and I understood the flow of the program better.
What are the strengths of Freeform?
There are three features of particular interest:
- The ability to attach lines and reshape them, as well as move them when moving the shapes themselves.
- How text automatically grows or shrinks inside a shape, reducing the amount of adjustment work you need to do.
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The nearly infinite size of the global canvas, which allows the graph to be built in any direction.
What are the limitations of Apple Freeform?
The product is significantly more powerful on the iPad. But my biggest complaint is that it’s not possible to save the drawings in any format other than PDF. If you want to save a drawing (like I did to show you sample screenshots), your best bet is to use a screenshot tool or program.
How much does Apple Freeform cost?
The software is free if you have an iPad, iPhone or Mac with the necessary OS versions. As a reminder, it is necessary to have version 16.2 or higher for iOS and version 13.1 or higher for macOS.
Source : “ZDNet.com”
