Apple‘s Freeform: 21 Tips and Tricks

hi this is Gary with macmost.com here are some apple freeform tips and tricks [Music] macmost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts so Apple's new freeform app which is part of Mac OS Ventura 13.1 and iOS and iPad OS 16.2 is a real hit here are a whole bunch of things you may not have known that you can do inside of a freeform board the background of any board is going to be white if you want it to be some other color all you need to do is add a shape behind everything for instance it'll be nice to have a black background color here if I create a shape just going to use a rectangle there and I stretch it to cover everything and I click on the fill color change that to Black and then select it again go to arrange and send to back now I can Center it on the rest of the elements there and now I've got a nice black background at least for this section of the board if I want to avoid accidentally selecting the background I can now go to arrange and lock and now I can easily select items in here without accidentally selecting the rectangle in the background on the iPad or iPhone if you want to rotate anything you pretty much just use two fingers on the touch screen on the Mac you can still rotate things but of course you can't use two fingers on your screen instead go to any one of the corners here and hold the command key down then you can see the pointer change there and I can click and drag and rotate the image or text or shape or whatever it is to any angle I want one thing freeform could be good for is to create flowchart and organizational charts but to do that well you need to have connection lines now on the Mac you can go to insert and notice that there's a connection line option here select that and you get the little curve line there so you don't actually need to use that menu item you could click here and then select the curve right there and that's actually a connection line the blue dots connect two things so that's how you would do it on the iPad and iPhone where you don't have a menu like that then all you need to do is drag the first Blue Dot to one item the second blue dot to another item and now they're connected you can use the Green Dot here to change the curve but if you just tap on it or click it you also can change the type click there and now you can change it to say this style here move the Green Dot to get it to connect like you want you can even copy and paste or option drag to duplicate it and I'll connect this one here as well move the Green Dot like that you can see it even snaps so now I've got a nice set of connection lines I can actually move this and you can see how the lines follow it now on the iPad you can use the apple pencil or your finger or your finger on the iPhone and you can select the drawing tools and you have a set of tools there at the bottom you can use the tool I have selected here now and actually draw a shape and it will fill it in like that but you could also use a regular drawing tool like this and then when you're done you can select that fill tool and then tap in the middle and it will color it in and then you could change the color here on the right tap again to color it indifferently you can divide it and then select fill select a color and then color in just that section now when you draw several shapes on the screen like that now if I want to move one of those around the key is to use a selection tool at the bottom it's this one right there and then I can Circle what I want and now that I've got it selected I can drag just that one item around in fact if you're using that suction tool at the bottom you can just actually use your finger tap and select an item there and then move it around if you exit the drawing tools you notice that the drawn items are together as one object so you have to go back to the drawing tools there at the bottom use the selection tool there at the bottom and then you can tap each individual shape another interesting thing you can do on the iPad and iPhone is you can trace something really easily so I brought a photo in here and I can use the apple pencil I'll tap in here to bring up the tools choose one of the tools there choose a color maybe set it to a larger size and then I can trace around an object if I want to create a shape from a photo you have a whole bunch of alignment tools that are just working automatically inside of freeform so if you create a shape like this and let's say I option drag to create a new copy and place it right here you can see how it snaps to the middle if I option drag again to create another copy I could snap them to a line but also notice I can snap to evenly space them you saw how there were arrows right there as I dragged and it figures out what I'm trying to do and allows me to perfectly space these items and I can keep going and create another one that's perfectly spaced in addition if I had another shape here and I wanted to get the same size as this it will snap to that so if I get it to just the right size it kind of snaps in you can see how it's indicating that this is now the same size as those other four shapes to the left you have controls for this in view go to guides and you can have Center guides Edge guides to match like the left and right edges of shapes you have relative sizing which is what I was just doing and relative spacing as well you have the same thing on the iPad and iPhone but you have to go into the settings app and then to free form and there you've got your Center guides Edge guides and spacing guides it seems to work for sizing as well and you can see it in action right there even though it doesn't show that as one of the options now the standard way to create a link is to click right here or go to insert and choose link and then you can type the URL hit insert and you get a link that looks like this but what if you just want to have a plain looking link you could do that as well create a text box like this and then in the text box you can just type the URL like this and you can see how it automatically gets the underline there so now I've got a plain text link that actually works if you select just the text that's a link and you control click on it two fingerling on the trackpad or right click on the mouse there's a remove link option there now when you create something like this and you want to use it somewhere else like say in a Pages document you could go and Export as a PDF and then you're going to get a really nice PDF that can be imported in it's going to be transparent just like it should I've got fills for these squares here and the rest is transparent I can bring that PDF into a Pages document like this and I could resize it because it's a PDF it looks great at any size however note that if you've got a board like this that's got a whole bunch of images in it exporting as a PDF is going to create a fairly large file each one of these images is the full image even though it's really small here in the board so you can see the resulting PDF is 15.4 Megs that's because you can really zoom in on these look at this image right here it's meant to be a small thumbnail but you can see I can get a lot of detail out of it because it's high resolution right there now on the Mac in preview you do have the ability to go to file and then export and then for a PDF you could choose a quartz filter and then reduce file size and then we'll save this out and what it's going to do is it's going to compress all of these based on the fact that they're really small in the actual image so now the second one here is only 337k but if I try to zoom in on the image there you can see how it's lower resolution now you can't create charts and have tables and things like that inside of freeform but that doesn't stop you from going into another app like Pages or numbers or keynote and then creating one there then selecting it copying it switching into freeform and then pasting it in there it actually works except it's converting it to an image so if I zoom in on it I can see the pixel starting to show here and of course it's not editable in any way but it is still a nice semi-transparent image now while the shapes in here give you lots of different options if you do want to bring in some clip art you can actually use semi-transparent PDFs if you've got access to such things for instance this one right here if I drag it in you can see instead of creating a link to the file it actually brings it in and this is a nice semi-transparent PDF here it's got really nice sharp lines that look good at any size and also free form works with EPS files so if you have a piece of clip art that's an EPS file you can bring that in and you can see that's going to insert it as an EPS not as a linked file and it's got really nice edges right in here sadly though it doesn't support the newer SVG file type now if you want to add a sticky note you can create one easily but changing the colors only gives you these options however on the Mac you do have more options with it selected I could go to format show colors and bring up the color Chooser and I can choose any color I want better still I can make it semi-transparent so it can float kind of on top of other items like glass and while this will show up and work fine on the iPad and iPhone I can't find any way to choose a different color and transparency on those devices an alternative is to Simply use a shape you can use either the basic square or maybe a rounded rectangle shape the advantage to using one of these is that you can now choose any color on any of the different devices just select the color wheel there choose what you want also you can make these non-square so you can have a little sticky note like that and of course you can put text in it just like you can in a sticky note the only real difference is how the shadow looks another thing you could do with shapes is you can combine them in the same ways you can do in Pages numbers and keynote so let's go and create a t-shirt shape right here and then let's add another shape and we can just pick anything like like perhaps this we could take this shape let's change its color so we could see it a little bit better like that and put it in the middle here and then we could of course just group these two together and it's just two shapes grouped but I could also with both of them selected go to format shapes and lines and I can unite them in various ways in this case I'm going to subtract them and it's going to cut a hole in the first shape so now I've got a new shape just like this and I could also go to shapes and lines here and break it apart and then I've got the separate items and I could go to shapes and lines make editable and now I've got all the points and I could drag them and change the shapes as I want now when you have some text like this you can click on the color chip there to change the colors and select more text colors to use the color wheel there you can click here and you can select some basic styling but you can also select fonts and it will open up the font panel on the Mac and that'll allow you to choose the typeface and then some of the typefaces have all sorts of different styles that you can access here in the style column another thing you can use the text box for is for emoji characters so I'm going to use control command space to bring up the Emoji Chooser the globe key and e works as well and then you can choose from the various different emoji symbols they're all sorts of different ones you can choose for all sorts of different uses once you bring one of those in you can resize it to make it fairly large you can hold the command key down and angle it and use it as quick clip art for your freeform board just remember all the different things that are available in here like for instance you've got flags for every country lots of different types of arrows lots of symbols there are thousands of different things you can use now you also can find lots of other clipart online and pngs jpegs all the standard formats work great even animated gifs will work in a board except they don't play automatically so for instance a little rotating Planet like this won't just play but if you make it large enough so it has the play button there you can actually play it like a video and you can course get rid of the Shadow and border around it as well you can also import audio files so I can bring in a audiophile aiff format Works wave MP3 works and then you get a little player here doesn't really look great visually but you do have the play button and you can play it now if you want to record something there's no recording option inside of freeform but you can use the Voice Memos app for that and guess what you can drag a voice memo from The Voice Memos app right into freeform and it will import it in and you've got it right there so it's fairly easy to record some audio bits and then bring them in you could even bring in music from the music app doesn't work with the Apple music service since that's streaming but if you have a regular audio file that's in the music app you can drag and drop it over and it will actually add it to the board and you could add several here so you could have a board that's music oriented with notes about each piece of audio and then you could play it now sometimes you may create something that you want to reuse over and over again but you don't want to build it from scratch each time like for instance say I want to add an image here with a background and a caption and I always want to do it in the same style so instead of recreating it or finding one and duplicating it you can create a Clips board and I've created one right here and I've put together this little collection of three elements you can even select it and then group it like that and then anytime I want to use this I can go into here copy it go back to the board that I'm currently building and paste it in and now it's fairly easy to go in and edit this I'll double click here so I'm just editing the image I can click here replace the image that's inside I can double click on this and I can change the caption and every time I want to add an element it looks like this I just go back to my clipboard instead of creating each of the three elements individually so fill this Clips board up with anything that you create that you think you may want to reuse my last suggestion is using freeform as a presentation tool now you could just do that by hooking your Mac iPad or iPhone up to a projector or you could be sharing your screen using AirPlay to Apple TV but another way to do that is actually have two devices so you could for instance be actually working on the freeform board on your Mac but you can have your iPad connected to the projector and showing the exact same board they're going to stay in sync so as you update the version on your Mac the one on the iPad is going to change and that's the one that people will see so now you can see I'm showing my iPad here and let's say that's connected to a projector and I could say be selecting things and changing them here and you would see that change then on the iPad which would be showing on the projector this could be a really interesting way to use this in the classroom or meeting room so I hope you found some of these tips and tricks for using freeform useful thanks for watching [Music] if you like this video click the Thumbs Up Button below to let me know I publish new tutorials each weekday hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss out

Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 276,402

Keywords: apple freeform, freeform app, freeform apple, new freeform app, apple freeform app, freeform app from apple, freeform app guide, how to use freeform, freeform tutorial, apple free form, freeform app ipados, freeform app ios, ipad freeform, iphone freeform app, mac freeform app, macos freeform app, mac freeform, freeform

Id: A5BwYkEu_iQ

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022