Whiteboards
Pan and zoom, stickies, shapes, frames and lines, one board per brand, saved exactly where you left it. What is different is what a board can hold and what it leaves with. Real records from your workspace sit on the canvas showing their current status, a note turns into one of them without you retyping it, and a line you drew can become a relation the whole workspace can see.
Whiteboards, close up
What lands on it
The board
Where it leaves for
What is travelling those lines
This is the same map as the one on the front of Solutions, zoomed into one surface. Everything on the left lands on the board. Everything on the right is a place in the workspace the board hands work to, and every one of those handovers waits for a person.
What it does
Drag a record out of the panel and the card on the board is that record: its current name, its current status, its description, re-read from the workspace every time the board opens. A card saved under an older naming of the same thing heals itself, so a board drawn a year ago starts opening the right records again.
Right-click a sticky or a shape and convert it. You pick where it belongs, then which kind, then what to call it. The note's text becomes the new record's body, a line of provenance points back at the board, and the sticky is rewritten in place as a live card bound to what you just made.
The board asks, in one round trip for the whole picture, which of the connections you drew match relations the workspace already holds. The true ones get a halo behind whatever line you drew. It also learns which pairs could never be related, so it never offers you a link the workspace cannot hold.
When two records could be related and are not, the connection offers to make it so. The workspace writes the relation into whatever actually owns it, so it appears on the record's own page and everywhere else relations show. It refuses to overwrite a field a person already set, it needs edit rights on both records rather than one, and the confirmation carries its own undo.
Double-click a card and change the record itself: its title, its status, its owner, when it is scheduled or published, its notes, its tags. The change is written to the record, not to a copy of it, and the card catches up immediately. Fields that kind does not have are shown as absent rather than hidden.
Point at a card and ask what else is connected to it. You get both directions, grouped by the kind of relation, and you can add one or add the lot. They arrive laid out in a column, already connected, each connection labelled by the relation it stands for. You are only ever offered what you are allowed to read.
A labelled frame owns whatever sits inside it. Drag the frame and everything whose centre falls within comes along. Frames nest, which is how you get lanes, and they always sit behind the work rather than on top of it.
Headings, lists and formatting in a box you can resize and put beside the diagram it explains. Type a mention of a real record inside it and that becomes a real link when the board saves. Scrolling inside it scrolls the document, not the board.
Paste from the clipboard or drop a file from the desktop. It uploads into the workspace media library, filed under boards, and lands as a real library item rather than something glued to the canvas. The library can then say which board is using it and will not let it be deleted while a board still shows it.
Download it at its own size with every label drawn on: sticky text, frame titles, record cards, document text and the labels on the lines. The workspace draws it from the saved board, and the board is saved first so the picture cannot lag your last move. The tiles in the board list come from the same drawing, so the two can never disagree.
The promotion ladder
Most sessions end with somebody photographing the wall and retyping half of it into a tracker the next morning. Here the note is the input. Right-click it and it becomes a real record in the workspace, without leaving the board and without you typing it twice.
Work and notes, a piece of writing, or a record on the product tree. What you pick decides which vocabulary the next step offers you, and it is read from your own brand rather than from a fixed list.
A task, a document or a note. A blog post or a social draft. A solution, a feature, a model, an attribute, a controller, a policy, a role, a lifecycle, a view, a layout, a component or a piece of middleware. Or a moment you want the workspace to start recording.
The title is suggested from what the note already says, and you can change it. Nothing is written until you press that last button. Up to that point the board has made two requests, both reads, both fetching your own brand's vocabularies.
What you wrote on the sticky becomes the new record's body, and the original wording stays on the card so nothing is lost in the promotion.
A line of provenance is written onto it pointing back at the board it was thought up on, so months later the question is still answerable.
The same node is rewritten in place as a live card bound to what you just made. It re-reads, it can be linked, and it can be edited from the board like any other.
Promotion is one direction. The other is dragging what already exists out of the panel and onto the canvas, where it keeps showing its own current status. These are the families that land as live cards rather than as text.
Every one of them is looked up inside this board's own brand, never across brands. A card whose record has been deleted keeps its last known name and says so, rather than vanishing and taking the shape of the board with it.
Where this sits
A board is where something gets thought up. Every one of these is a place that thinking can land as a real record with its own page, and each of them has a page you can read.
The tree most boards are drawn about. Every kind on it can sit on a board as itself, be edited there, and be wired to another one by drawing a line and making it true.
Read ProductWhere a promoted sticky most often lands. The new entry keeps the link back to the board it came from, so a session ends with work rather than a photograph.
Read ArtifactsPut the drafts for a launch on one board in the order they go out, or turn a sticky straight into a draft and carry on drawing.
Read ContentPut the moments you already record on a board, lay out the order they happen in, and connect them to the records they belong with.
Read EventsYours to keep
Every one of these we would choose again.
The brand is fixed the day the board is created and cannot be changed afterwards. A record from another brand cannot be dropped on it, lookups are strictly inside the board's own brand, and a relation is refused outright without a concrete brand. That is a safety property, not a gap.
Every save carries the version it started from. A save that would land on top of somebody else's work is refused rather than quietly applied, and you are told who moved first and asked to choose. There is no automatic merge, on purpose, because a merged board is one that nobody drew.
A line on the canvas is a line on the canvas. Asking the workspace whether it is already true is a read. The only thing that writes is you clicking that connection and saying make it real, and the exact inverse is one click away on the same connection.
No part of the canvas calls an AI, including the two controls wearing a sparkle. Tidying is arithmetic and converting a note is a form you fill in. Every request the board makes is an ordinary read or write.
A connection the workspace confirms gets a halo behind it. It does not get restyled into some house line. Your routing, your dashes, your arrows and your label all survive being right.
A board draws nobody but you. There is no shared cursor and no co-editing, and it is better to read that here than to find it out in a meeting. Elsewhere in the workspace a colleague can still see which board you are on and come and look.
Questions
Keep reading
Where a promoted sticky usually ends up.
The tree most boards are drawn about.
The drafts you lay out on a launch board.
The messages that go out beside them.
Open the workspace, do one real piece of work in it, and the joins will show you the rest.