Sorry, there were no releases from us for a full month, but here we go:
Entity History/Activity
Finally, you can track what was changed in every entity (not Document so far, sorry). Navigate to any entity and find the View Activity icon in the top right:
History shows all who changed what and when. Note that Rich Edit field changes are not tracked yet, this is another story to support documents history as well.
Integromat Integration
Integromat is more powerful in Zapier for some cases, so we added Fibery-Integromat integration. Here is the detailed article that explains everything:
Better Smart Folder setup
Smart Folders setup is streamlined, and it is easier to create deeper hierarchies. Here we create a Smart Folder that shows Products and nested Epics in left menu:
New Infrastructure
This is an invisible thing for you, but as a side effect, you may see better Fibery performance and expect more stability. We also have full control over our infrastructure and do not depend on third-party expertise, so we can fix problems faster as well.
In a nutshell, weâve migrated from Softlayer to AWS and are pretty happy with the results so far.
Improvements
Allow Editors to create and edit docs and whiteboards (previously only Creators were able to do that).
Now when you share an App or the whole Workspace, it is possible to create a new Account following the link.
Do not suggest deactivated Users in @mentions.
Unlink Docs & Whiteboards from entity to App-level. When unlinked, a Doc or Whiteboard appears as the last View in the App.
Back navigation for Documents and Whiteboards linked to entities is there.
Integration setup is simplified: there are fewer steps now and some options are preselected by default.
Fixed bugs
Newly installed Apps should be placed below the current ones
Calendar View: browser hanging on not-configured calendar
Wooohooo, activity history! Very happy to see this. Also the new nested smart folders, I didnât really imagine how that might work, but conceptually I like this implementation a lot. Have yet to experiment with it, but itâs definitely promising. Glad to see youâre back to releases, and hopefully back to a regular cadence from here.
Could you let me know if you have a v2 planned? I think the Activity Log in this iteration is pretty sparse, Iâm missing:
Info on the specific comments. Most good Activity Streams Iâve used actually include comments, donât just say âsomebody commented.â Even a snippet of the comment would be helpful, otherwise you have to go down to the comment stream, which at times if you have reference and a lot of Collections is WAY down the page, to see what was actually commented. This is very important context, for example if a state is changed due to something written in a comment, you should be able to see that context right in the Activity Stream
Activity on the Entity/Type build out: This is a key aspect of Fibery. Granted, it happens on the Type level, not Entity, but it would be very good to know when a field is added. This is particularly relevant given the lack of ability to move Entities between Types, so itâs useful to be able to see when youâve added a field or removed one, or edited one. This gets into more Fibery-wide Streams, like App history as well, and âentire workspaceâ Stream, but without these additional pieces, this Entity-only history is limited for my needs at least
References history. This is very relevant. Given how much of a key part of Fibery References/Highlights are, and the fact that you do a great job in the References area actually show who created a reference and when, I would really like to see that info in the Activity feed too, just like comments.
specific time of activity: Sorry I continue to have difficulty with â1M agoâ as this forces you to mouse over the date, which brings a few issues: You canât see that info at a glance, so you have to work more to get context, and 2) Iâm not sure a growing team will figure this out on their own, so you force the admin to do work to train them on something they should be able to just simply âseeâ
Glad to see this is in motion, but I hope this isnât all we get for the next year or so, as itâs a very minimal amount of information for what I was expecting, and what I am used to in other apps Iâm comparing to FiberyâŚ
@B_Sp Indeed we are going to improve History till completion. All you mentioned will be added, however, I am not sure about time UI. The exact time is quite cluttered and not sure you really want to see the exact date for 1 month old events.
Personally I would be fine if the time disappeared after ~1 week, but I always want to have the full date displayed. Always. I have never found the âshorthandâ for dates to be as helpful as it promises to be.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but I personally canât imagine needing to know the exact date for a month-old comment. I mean, where I work, a lot of comments become stale after less than a week. Iâd hate to think there were comments I hadnât taken on board after more than a month.
I just feel better knowing the date than some (to me) vague ânumber of months ago, however the system decides to round or count thingsâ type of thing. Itâs black box behavior that raises too many questions/concerns for me. Does it count actual months? Or 30 day increments? When does it consider it âanother monthâ, at 15, 16, or 17 days beyond the previous, or what? Does this vary for shorter months like February? What about leap years?
For example I have a comment that was entered on October 21st of last year. If you asked me to tell you how long ago that was, I would not have said 3 months, because itâs February now, itâs almost 1.5 weeks since it was â3 months agoâ, and itâs arguably now closer to â3.5 months agoâ. But no, of course I donât want it to say â3.5 monthsâ. I just want it to show the date, because why not have the date? Is â3mâ better? Or just ânot worseâ? If itâs ânot worseâ for you, and for me and some others it is worse, then probably the full date display is better.
This uncertainty may not have significant business consequences on a regular basis, but it - and the occasional times when I do have to hover to get the exact date - do create âfrictionâ which makes a tool feel less pleasant to use. The more points of friction you have, the more unpleasant the tool is to use, itâs cumulative (if not multiplicative).
While weâre on the subject, I donât think I - or probably anyone - needs the time to the second for changes. To the minute seems good enough, so that can clean up the time/date stamp a bit.
I know weâre all different, but for me, â3mâ is better
I think itâs because my brain doesnât âseeâ dates intuitively.
I just looked at a comment by a colleague that was made on âJanuary 30 2021, 11:05:45 pmâ.
There are 12 digits in that piece of text.
If I have to do a mental calculation to work out how âoldâ that comment is, my brain just couldnât get to the rough answer as quickly as if I just read (â3 days agoâ).
I suppose itâs a bit like someone telling me that their house is â7 furlongs, 232 yards, 2 feet and 4 inches awayâ when they could have just said âabout a mile awayâ.
Anyway, I donât write this to try and convince anyone, but just to say that the current implementation matches my needs brilliantly. Of course, the world would be a dull place if we all liked the same things
Fair enough, but⌠is it the detail/specificity that is the issue, or friction in doing mental calculations on dates? I ask because I do think there is probably still a place for the on-hover functionality, I just think it should work differently. I would like to see:
The time and âTodayâ or âYesterdayâ for anything in the last 24hrs. I can very easily know the date for today or yesterday.
The specific date with no time for any date prior to that. Time would only show on-hover.
I realize of course that then there is a lack of âconsistencyâ between how recent and older things are displayed. Iâd be fine too with the time only showing for things âtodayâ and date showing for everything else. But I think some people may want time for âyesterdayâ.
Anyway, would something like this approach still trip you up in understanding how long ago something was? Or is it simply some amount of information overload with the current very detailed timestamps? Because I do agree that the current timestamps are overkill! Especially being down to the second (as I mentioned).
Yeah, youâre right. I think thereâs probably two things at play here:
One is the way in which the information conveys meaning to the reader. For me, the comment/activity dates are only meaningful as a time delta from now. Just like that the timings within a NASA space mission are referenced to the point of launch (âT minus 10 secondsâ, etc.) I only care about how the info relates to ânowâ.
The second is the various preferences people might have for non-linear granularity settings (when to show seconds, when to show time of day, when to show just the date, etc.)
In this context, I may actually be quite closely aligned with you on when the step changes in granularity should occur (I donât ever need to know seconds ) but for the first point, Iâll always be a âdelta-Tâ guy
Gotcha. Yeah, that helps, and it makes total sense. And certainly I donât want to suggest the Fibery team spend time implementing a bunch of customization for this or anything. But if there is a way to address the needs of most people with a hybrid approach, then it might be worth doing so IMO. I do note at least that there is clear friction for some people with the âimpreciseâ date display âfrom nowâ. And that the inclusion of seconds in the time display is probably unnecessary, generally speakingâŚ
Hey guys and @Chr1sG as you as well. On this I am squarely with Oshyan, as is probably pretty obvious since I mentioned this as a shortcoming way up the thread!
So my vote is for showing the when, not âhow long agoâ - and I might add @Oshyan I really agree here:
This is a big annoyance of Youtube Iâve found. I have seen âa year agoâ refer to something as old as 23 months, while âthis yearâ referring to something 11 months old! But when you click in deeper, you get the actual time - and this is why I know those are incorrect statements about âhow long ago.â So although you have to click extra to get it with YouTube, you can see that. And I know that you can hover over the dates in Fibery and get the exact time - so thankfully thatâs available.
But I wonder how hard would it be from a UI standpoint to offer both? Let me provide the example of Navigation Systems. I really that in early days of GPS, car manufacturers would either offer a countdown to arrival, or a time, but not both at once. Just about all now have both at once, though. Could we not have that as a solution to satisfy all?
Yes good point! So good challenge for a UI designer - Fibery has done some good stuff here so perhaps they can pull it off, given the desire for both variants around here!
Just another comment here and suggestion - I would really love if we could see the actual comments, perhaps via a reduced text, or maybe toggle so you could toggle them open to read, but they would not show as default. As I use the Activity Log and see that somebody âcommentedâ it really takes some discipline not to get frustrated by not seeing the actual comment itself, which is paramount to the history or any entity.
Would love to hear if you guys might implement this small improvement earlier than bigger things like Fibery-wide Activity Stream and other more ambitious improvements.
Thanks and very glad we have this initial history now available!
Improvements
Fixed bugs
