Not sure if this is a bug as our colleague @helloitse suggested in this post:
But if it’s a missing feature, I wanted to request it.
I frequently use the “open as view” option in entity, shown here:
I cannot close that window, and in fact I have to do a lot of navigating around other tables, views, etc. to get the view to “reset” so the entity in question returns to the “show as popup” size.
Thanks and hoping you can let me know about this, it would really help my navigation around Fibery!!
Hi again guys. Wanted to bump this up, could you let us know your thoughts on when you might address this?
This is something that will cost me many, many clicks during each session in Fibery given that in order to get out of this view, I have to surf around my left menu to find cards that are in “smaller” format, when it seems that it would be just so easy to revert out of the view via the “three dot” ellipses.
Sorry again guys but wanted to flag this up, would be grateful for a response here. This is probably the most cumbersome UI element I have to deal with in Fibery. When I open up the Entity Card to get to this view, the only way I can get out of it again is to start clicking in the left menu, and it still keeps the card that size till I open it another way, like from another view.
Really slows my flow in Fibery, a shame really as much of what you’ve designed is very natural!
Thanks in advance for taking the time to respond here!
OK thanks! Good to know. I hadn’t tried that, wouldn’t call it intuitive though. So I’d still really like to get some feedback from the team about this issue. My own team is going to have a hard time figuring this out - and they’ve complained about it - since they are used to being able to adjust the size of the Entity Details between “show as popup” and “show as sidebar” as switching between those is well executed on the UI.
This situation seems like something that just got forgotten and creates an awkward experience, and seems like it should be relatively easy to fix in the Fibery back-end - although there might be some issue preventing it that I don’t appreciate. Another reason I’m saying that is our fellow community member also asserting that it actually has the feel of a bug:
When I click the entity, I can’t seem to reduce it out of this view at all. I assume that might be by design? It would be good to know, as again this is confusion to me and my team who are frequently looking for the “sidebar” or “pop-up” versions.
I have to say I am getting a bit disappointed that @mdubakov or team do not seem to respond to many threads like this one. I’ll refrain from going into a list, but in the last few months I have gotten a bit jaded with the degree of posts that do not get attention. A few words would be helpful, as without that myself and others in the community chat about many requests and just speculate. If what I mention above about the “show all entities of this type in the left menu…” means that when you click an entity from the left menu, it will always show up in “open as view” format, I’d expect to see that in the Knowledge Base. Short of that, the Fibery team should take a few moments and respond to this post. Discourse - the software hosting this community - has a terrific search functionality and users like me could get an answer to this thanks to this community and others like myself, @helloitse, and @Jean who are taking time to flag up this problem.
This type of figuring out on my own is one of my greatest frustrations with Fibery - and as much as I like Fibery, there are many frustrations like this that I really think are unnecessary. I believe that when we are all taking time to post our concerns in here, the team needs to find time to respond. No matter how busy you are, you have to prioritize that as a start-up. This is yet another thread about a basic feature that I’m disappointed not to get any response whatsoever from the team on.
I hesitate to mention it, but the fact is with this neglect I’m starting to think Notion outperforms Fibery in this respect. Their two public means of communication on their roadmap - when you write to them in Intercom, and twitter - always are responded to. And their volume of requests-to-employee ratio is degrees greater than Fibery. They don’t have a public roadmap per se, but I am sure that if I asked them about some feature that I wanted to know about, like this post, somebody would respond to either say “yes we’ll add your vote” or “yes, that’s expected behavior in the left menu when you turn on 'show all entities…”
I obviously cannot speak for the Fibery team, but I have a couple of comments, and please don’t take them the wrong way.
If I’m developing a product, I have to figure out where to allocate my resources. Every hour my employee spends on responding to customer enquiries is an hour he/she is not spending on product development (or other things). Now, obviously I can’t think of many cases where it would be good practice to have 0% customer interaction, and conversely 100% would be meaningless(!), so the question is how to strike the best balance? Personally, I want Fibery to spend lots of time making the product better, and not so much time writing acknowledgements of my posts.
Also, not all customers are created equal. I know full well that I am not the type of customer they are targeting, and the money I spend on Fibery is not enough to make it worth their while to acknowledge anything I post, let alone promise to support me/develop a feature for me, etc. (I am basically benefiting from the work they are doing for ‘other people’)
I guess you could say I’m getting poor customer service, but on the other hand, they would go out of business pretty quick if they did focus their efforts on providing responsive customer service to people like me.
It’s quite possible that the things that you (and I, and a lot of the other ‘regulars’) end up discussing on these forums are not things that the Fibery team believe are valuable to their target market and therefore they are not inclined to spend much time talking about (or executing on).
Or maybe they are just busy working on them, and they haven’t realised that beavering away in silence is alienating one or two of their customers.
Or maybe they’re struggling to get the resources they need
Anyway, as I said, don’t take it the wrong way, I really appreciate that there’s a great community of enthusiasts here, and you’re right in the thick of it. I just wouldn’t let the drive you have to see Fibery develop in positive directions end up being a source of frustration and disappointment if it doesn’t happen as fast as you want it. Don’t forget that if they acknowledged every good idea and made roadmap of promises that they then didn’t deliver, we’d be beating them up for that instead!
I have to agree with @Chr1sG . Considering everything that’s going on, the younger company that Fibery is vs. Notion (this should not be underestimated!), the lesser funding they have, not to mention the political situation in their country, I think they’re doing pretty well. Fibery dev wasn’t even started until a full year after Notion’s initial release.
Honestly I’ll take Fibery’s weekly (or near-weekly) feature releases, reasonable hints at what they’re working on (that actually get fulfilled! and not in years but months or weeks!), and semi-regular engagement here, over Notion’s infrequent and often insubstantial releases, generally merely placating comments re: feature requests (e.g. “Good idea, we’ll add it to the list!” then nothing ever happens), but admittedly more robust overall community engagement. And on Twitter, at least, while the Fibery volume is way lower than Notion, they seem to respond at a similar rate and with similar helpfulness to @ mentions. Notion community is just far larger, for better or worse.
Bottom line, from what I can see as a long-time watcher and tester of both these apps, Fibery is actually making more rapid and notable forward progress as a tool than Notion. Certainly it’s harder to see that when features you particularly value or require are not seeming to get attention, and I have sympathy for that. Our personal pain points are understandably hard to see beyond because they reflect our real and daily experience with the system.
But for example I can say that the issue you point out here just isn’t a problem for me. Very occasionally I’ll have a mild annoyance getting “out” of a view, but I make such heavy use of my mouse’s back/forward physical buttons that I usually don’t notice because Fibery mostly respects browser navigation/history well (which is not something I can say about all apps! Notion has a particular bug/annoyance here actually, which I reported over a year ago). Now obviously it is an issue for some, as you and your users are apparently experiencing.
Indeed it would be ideal for someone on the Fibery team to reply here about this (and other things). But from personal experience inside a product team I know that often there just isn’t much that can or should be said publicly. And while some teams are more OK with placating non-answers than others (e.g. Notion), perhaps Fibery would rather not answer until they have something meaningful to say.
I think you can reasonably assume that they do see and read all of this and that they’re doing their best to prioritize all the many requests here. It may seem like an easy fix to you, but they have to consider the way the whole system functions, and there may be aspects of this that make it more complex to address than it may seem from the outside. Overall I think they make good forward progress every week or two, and with almost every single release I think “Hey, that’ll be handy”. If you can say that about Notion (I can’t), then perhaps it’s the better tool for your needs.
I think ultimately you just need to truly determine for yourself whether Fibery is mature enough for your actual production work with it; whether its current capabilities outweigh its current limitations for you. For me it is absolutely a productivity enhancer and feels much better than Notion does for the particular work I am using it for. There are features I miss from Notion, of course! But on balance Fibery enables my work much more than Notion would.
The other “X factor” I weigh somewhat heavily is that Fibery is, as I said, advancing more rapidly (in my opinion). I just trust the team behind it more than the Notion team, quite frankly. When I see information from the Fibery team (mostly Michael, but some other great recent articles from others too) it is candid, accessible, and rich in meaning, and often contains specific information that many other teams don’t share (MRR, burn rate, etc.), which gives me unique and valuable insight into the team and product’s status and health, and thus often greater confidence in the product.
When I see communication from the Notion team, it is most often overly positive and inauthentic-seeming, it is generally more marketing than technical insight, thick with obfuscating language and buzzwords, but little real substance. And as I’ve pointed out before, Michael has successfully founded and built a strong, well-respected product before. No one high-up at Notion has, as far as I know, at least nothing as well-known as Targetprocess, and we know they have already had 1 near-failure due to bad choices, and arguably the API and localization issues are also indicative of potentially poor dev choices. That is not to say that they are not very intelligent and highly capable, only that they really do just have less experience navigating the overall app dev lifecycle than Michael does.
I hope all that does not feel too critical of you and your concerns. I absolutely see and validate that you have many real concerns, based on your actual experience! I just don’t see it the same way as you, I guess. To me Notion is far more opaque and I question their progress, pace, and communications far more than I do the Fibery team. I suspect if you had come to both products at the same point in their development and maturity cycle, you might also feel differently.
But regardless I hope you can decide whether Fibery is worth sticking with despite these issues, and feel good about that choice moving forward. And I hope you do stick around as I’ve valued your ideas, requests, and insight in my time here.
You now use ALT+Arrow key. At first I hated that change, but I realized that I have many times been victim of wanting to delete characters only to navigate back and lose lots of progress due to the way the input was implemented or browser behaviour.
I use Vivaldi, so if I do open the view (personally I never really use it), I can hold right-click and drag to the left or right to navigate back and forth
The views in the sidebar cover the entire screen, so I would think that is indeed by design as it is the natural behaviour of anything you click there (that it is not a popup). They’re sort of like a page in of themselves, like if you go to the direct link of an entity. Same when you open the entity as a view, it is essentially like going to a different page. Now I can agree that a “Back” button like the popups would be nice there, if you have some saved navigation states.
As Oshyan mentioned, it may be more complicated things that has to be done due to the infrastructure than just implementing, or even that they can do one better—but takes a little more time.
Agreed. This is why I have made a habit of checking the forum weekly for changelogs and read them to see what was fixed, changed, or added.
To be honest, I’m not sure what alternate behaviour might be expected, if you open an entity from the sidebar. If there was a X in the top corner when the entity is viewed full screen
where would you expect to end up?
If there was a double-arrow icon to ‘un-maximise’ (fullscreen → ‘pop-up’) or a ‘Show as sidebar’ icon to (move the entity to the right) what would you expect to be shown in the background/on the left?
I totally get that if you go from popup to fullscreen, it seems logical that you ought to be able to go back with a click on an icon somewhere, but given that the fullscreen view is also what is reached when accessing the entity from the sidebar, I guess they decided that two versions of full screen (one with and one without an unmaximise button) was not worth the effort.
And FWIW, I don’t use the fullscreen view very often either but YMMV
Hey, appreciate all that, nothing taken the wrong way you have a lot of strong arguments! Been meaning to respond to this one as it’s something that I have been thinking a lot about…
Just had an instance of this today when I was working in an Entity, and had to pause and do something else on my computer. When I came back to Fibery and that Entity was no longer on the screen. Used “cmd” + “K” to find it in search, and it opened up in the “open as view” wide view. So in the scenario, in order for me to get it back to the “view as pop-up,” no backspace or “alt” arrow will work, as I wasn’t previously in any other view.
I think my issue is about a disappointing trend - and sorry if this is going to rustle some feathers as much as I’m a fan of Fibery, but it’s true, of next to zero response to posts I have in this community, starting some months ago and lasting for a long time now. I am literally talking about getting a regular response, which I used to see, which takes at max 10 min to formulate, but which his not happening at all lately. I am fully aware of the points you raise, as I develop software as well. And I fully subscribe to most Agile and Lean philosophies, too. Which expressly say - to paraphrase - “do not go dark on valuable feedback from customers,” in particular those that take time to provide it in detail you can act on.
These are just the first two pages of this forum, in the Feature Request Category:
You have to go to the 2nd page just to start to see posts with one response, and that’s not necessarily from Team Fibery!
Fibery asks you when you subscribe, in their Intercom Window, to join this community. It is worrisome to me that they are not prioritizing responding to people, like myself, taking the time to do so. I have used many apps that take such a careless approach, and I generally abandon them.
Also I was intrigued by what you @Chr1sG wrote here:
It’s funny at times I wonder if the Fibery’s team recent ignoring of just about everything I post is because that is what they think, too. But I don’t think I’m asking “please develop my requests first,” and this is a big reason for my frustration. If you read my posts in the community, I am generally flagging up needed features that Fibery, when they do respond, tend to agree with, and for sure are must-haves if Fibery expects to become a prime-time player. Such as Native Mobile Apps, proper commenting & Notifications, larger things like automations and integrations. In the case of this particular post, we are dealing with a simple item that is potentially a bug as pointed out by @helloitse. I would not say this has anything to do with Fibery’s “development” as you put it. I’d just like some explanation of what is going on in this relevant aspect of how Fibery works, and if they will acknowledge that. How long could that take them?
Here is a summary of what we’re talking about, and what the Fibery team has decided they will not respond to, when at least 4 people in the community have weighed in here asking for some kind of commentary:
The handling of this window is not inline with the other two views - sidebar and pop up.
It shows up in a few different instances, and takes away substantially from your flow around the Fibery app when it shows up, as you can’t easily get out of it.
There is ZERO mention of this view in any documentation or Knowledge base.
With all that in mind, I believe I’m doing the team a favor by flagging it up and documenting thoroughly the whole situation. This is not the only such post like this out there that is being ignored. I’d expect that with that in mind, there would be some prioritization to respond, when somebody like me asks a 2nd or 3rd time for it. I have quite a few posts where I’ve posted 2 - 3x to myself essentially begging for some guidance, with zero response. Just guidance, not actual development of the feature in question. Like a response of the nature I used to get - “yes for sure that is needed and we plan to develop it.” Without even that, I am now wondering if, and not when, I might expect things like the Activity Stream
Also allow me to respond to this point:
I don’t exactly agree with that. Customer Feedback is so valuable if you want to succeed, you have to find time to respond to it. Fibery has Notion squarely in its crosshairs, and I am no doubt confident that Notion has much less manpower-to-user ratio. But Notion responds to EVERYTHING, if you are a paying customer, or not. Have you seen their official channels? There are two - Twitter, and internally via Intercom. They respond to virtually everything they are sent in Twitter, and I have never sent them a support message I did not hear back from them on. This is the philosophy of many a successful app in the world. The idea is: If somebody takes time to address you as a user, YOU MUST RESPOND. There are many experts, and I agree with them, that believe you may go out of business if you actually don’t respond to people “like you,” as you put it.
I do not consider myself entitled or demanding. If Fibery chooses to handle this situation the way they are doing it, in the context of many, many other similarly ignored requests, I will simply move on to another solution as a user who does not feel they are getting good support. Nothing odd about that.
There are 274 users on this community. That’s barely a fraction of most other apps in this space. Yet Notion responds to everything. I don’t buy that the team can’t find time to respond. I almost feel like I’ve become a nuisance or somehow they’ve decided that I don’t need a response. Whatever the reason, I have gotten jaded and lost steam for my enthusiasm for Fibery. That goes for my eagerness to talk it up, for example in public forums. Do they really want previously evangelical users to go down that road, while they are seemingly fighting for every paid account right now?
I mean no disrespect and I get your points. But this is not a case of “not having time” or “we can’t tailor our roadmap to meet everybody’s desire.” If you look at my posts in this forum, in no way can you interpret them as demands for my agenda. I generally talk about things that Fibery will need to have if it is to become a prime-time player in the space. I put a lot of time into it, and that feedback serves them more than me in the end. Anybody who develops with a modern Agile and Lean approach will agree with that. And at this point I feel ignored. That’s on Fibery, not on me.
Appreciate the chime in from @Oshyan and @Haslien as well, and I wish you all the best. I am still on the fence Fibery moving forward, and it would sure help convince me if they responded in a timely way!
lots of community feedback = much more to read, especially when derailing
if it has active traction, wait until it settles to go over all feedback (I do this with people sending me multiple messages )
be careful not to (accidentally) promise too much when you go about interacting with the community
if above, then all you really get is generic replies. A waste of time IMO, but I also agree that at least it gives indication of it being noted (although I bet everything here is noted anyway)
maybe they’re hard at work with final set of highly anticipated features “promised” much earlier (e.g. Intercom/Trello/Git integrations, which just got released as beta) as well as the marketing campaign they have been hiring for
few community relations people. I think there’s just 1 actually, but questions that heavily rely on developers and/or project manager’s eyes on it if it’s even feasible, a relevant request, or what to respond
if above, being careful with not hiring more community relations people just yet to keep current burn rate, or at least wait until marketing campaign success bring in more customers first
If you look at No Man’s Sky (a game) that over promised and talked too at launch got huge backlash for that. They realized that they just need to “shut up” and work with a “Show, don’t tell” attitude. The founder aggregated all feedback, but didn’t give anyone indication he collected it. Radio silence for a long time (months!), and now they’ve made a comeback with the game.
Due to there being lots of requests and texts to read, I always try to keep messages “to them” succinct, with brief example(s) so it’s as fast as possible to digest.
In our company essentially the boss is the one to responds to all emails, and she’s always about a week worth of emails behind even when using templated responses—it’s not even her only role. Of course, it always depends on the nature of the questions and quantity for how long it takes, but I can guess our requests takes a bit of time to properly read, fully understand, and reply to. Reading and properly responding to emails, and equivalent, takes a lot of time apparently (not that I know, because I don’t work with correspondence much, but it’s what I hear).
First I just want to say that I definitely understand and somewhat share your concerns @B_Sp.
Indeed, I am of two minds here, because in the Notion community I see lots of response from their team, but so very many of them are incredibly generic it is frustrating and seems often fairly meaningless. Then again I do feel the lack of response here is a concern or at the very least a frustration for anyone like us who is significantly engaged in discussion here.
I will say that, when I was the community relations and support person for a small app, my desire was to respond to almost every request/question/etc. in some way, if we could. The dev did not fully agree with that approach, so that is one of the tensions you deal with in these situations. I tried to balance it with the belief that saying “No, we can’t or don’t plan to do that” or “this is a good idea but not any time soon” are both also valid answers. In other words that being open and honest with people, even when you have to say something they don’t want to hear, is a valid part of a good communications strategy. I’d frankly like to see more of that here.
Yes, I have recently seen more mention of “Fibery 2.0” coming and I wonder what is actually included in that. Is it just a “mile marker” that considers the significant work done since “1.0” release (a year ago?) and calls it “2.0” on that basis? Or does it mean many significant new and long-in-development features are coming that we haven’t yet heard (much) about? Or perhaps something in-between. We don’t know, but it seems to be coming soon, so it’s worth hanging around to see what happens… https://twitter.com/fibery_io/status/1319186279033167873
I have been in the position of being the 1 and only “community relations” person and having many questions around implementation of specific features that are essentially unanswerable except by a dev. So I could not give a meaningful answer without asking them. It did still save some of their time/effort since I could bring only the really important/difficult stuff to them and answer the rest myself, but it was still challenging and often response would take more time than I wanted it to. I had to keep bugging the dev, which was not a fun position to be in.
So all that said, I totally understand the difficulty of managing the various needs in a situation like this, with a small software dev company. And yet I do agree the team could be doing a bit better of a job. Of course I am on the outside, I don’t know what else @Polina_Zenevich has to do, probably a lot (and the direct Intercom connection probably takes up a lot of time! I’ll get back to this in a moment), so I know it’s easier to say “do more” than to actually accomplish it sustainably. But I’d point to one particular thing I mentioned above that might help and which I’d like to see more of, which is the kind of “we see your request but we can’t promise to implement it any time soon” combination of acknowledgement and setting expectations honestly.
Speaking of Intercom, I am wondering if it is actually a good strategy for the team to encourage contact there so much. Yes, forums are not for everyone, it’s true. But if interaction here were more encouraged, if the devs engaged more here with the kinds of questions they frequently field on Intercom (and maybe there is even a way to auto-generate forum topics from Intercom??), then I think it would save some customer support time because over time the answers to common questions get built up. And Discourse has a pretty good search and built-in “Is the topic you’re writing answered by this existing discussion?” feature to help minimize duplication and noise. Not to mention many of us active forum members are pretty inclined to help others and could shoulder some of the load for simpler (or even sometimes not so simple) questions. Obviously it’s not my place to recommend deprioritizing Intercom, and I don’t have any inside information to properly inform such a recommendation even if I could. But I do wonder…
So where do I stand, personally, on all this? Well, I’m pretty all-in on Fibery for a specific aspect of my life, managing my real estate company. It works very well for that because my primary needs are for customizable records of a variety of data, good interconnection between them, quick access (e.g. search) to any given piece of info, and finally good UI/UX so non-tech people can use the system. On those measures Fibery already meets my needs, for the most part. I guess I am lucky in that respect. But I do have some remaining needs that are fairly important, such as activity stream and/or notifications. And so I share the concerns being expressed by @B_Sp and others, that responses have slowed down here, and I am uncertain about when (or if) some of these things are coming.
My position right now is to wait and see what this “Fibery 2.0” actually consists of, as well as to see what the next monthly report has to say about what they’re working on, as well as all the numbers and whether they are going in a reasonably good direction (burn rate, customer retention, etc.). I am glad that Michael continues to share all that (and I’m avoiding tagging him here to consciously reduce noise in his notifications, hah). I am currently “wait and see”, and probably won’t abandon ship any time soon even if I don’t get a positive indication in the near future. What it will affect is how I talk about Fibery publicly and whether I continue recommending it and to who…
Interesting discussion, I replied to most concerns here:
Fibery 2.0 is a “mile marker” for us, we don’t do huge releases, but release every week (almost). So don’t expect huge unexpected features. Again, we are very transparent and always show what we are working on.
I do agree that my participation in this community should be better and I will improve here.
As for the original problem, we try to make Back button behavior in Fibery just work. So rely on it all the time when you need to get back from anywhere.
I suspected as much and as I’ve said before I really appreciate the transparency. The frequent releases are definitely better, in my view, than saving up a bunch of huge features for big milestones. I appreciate too that we even get to use “MVP” or “partial” implementations of some features that add some functionality, so we don’t have to wait for a “full” implementation to get some benefits.
I just wanted to come back and post one more instance of the original topic and the problem I’m having with it still.
Before I do that however, big thanks to @mdubakov and @Oshyan for this commentary, which is off this topic, but has really won my faith in Fibery back! I will be responding around the community as well more where some posts are that I would like to weigh in on directly.
All that said, again I would be grateful if any of you could address this behavior, it’s probably the most troublesome for me around this whole issue:
This .gif is a little truncated, but I think I am showing the problem I have:
I am in a view, say board view, looking at the “pop up” version of a Card
I then pull up the “ctrl” + “K” search dialog
I select an entity to view from that dialog
That entity opens up in the “open as view” full page.
I hit the back button and the “open as view” card I just selected disappears and the previous card is displayed.
So I cannot hit the back button to get it reduced down to “pop up” or “side bar” because that closes the card entirely. So if I want to get that card to either of those views, I have to painstakingly seek it out on the left menu. Since I, like I believe many of the colleagues in the community, primarily navigate Fibery with the “ctrl” + “K” dialog - which is terrific I will add - I am not used to getting around by trying to find my entities in the left menu.
Please let me know if I’m missing something here. Although I appear to be in the minority on this one, I would really love a way to just “minimize out” this view to one of the other two. And also I want to point out I fully get the behavior when you surf to an entity on the left menu and it opens in this view, as also discussed above. That seems like natural behavior. It’s just when I get this view in other unintended situations it is very problematic. To reiterate the point:
I actually rarely intend to use this view too, just it “forces itself” on me most of the time!
Thanks again for the continue help and (hopefully) ultimate solution to this issue!
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