Whiteboarders dream mindmapping hack

After years of trying to find the best large format mindmapping canvas the answer is simple handy and… obvious when you know how.

Ive tried all kinds of drawing and graphics apps over the years in the quest for a nice large working space. Something like a big spacious whiteboard in real life.

Every now and then an app emerges with what is advertised as an “endless canvas” but these end up disappointing by either losing fidelity/ resolution on save or being unsharable because the app provides no reliable way of sharing with those who don’t have the app.

Well that all ended this morning.

I was fooling around with apples keynote app and decided to see what maximum size the master screen could be made

To my astonishment I did a screen 6400 pixels wide and 4000 high. 12 pt text is still beautiful and legible on zooming in. So then I saved as pdf.

It works.

Everything still zooms beautifully and the text looks great. To top it off the file was only a few hundred k.

Then the magic really started. I opened the pdf on my phone and my ipad pro and added notes and they all scaled!

Zowee.

Now I can write notes in detail, edit and move them and share them with the convenience of pdf sharing with everyone I work with.

Finally, a solution that brings the nice spatial ease of a real whiteboard to the small screen.

Enjoy.

First published on Medium | 2 min read