Excited for the next iteration of Whiteboards, and I know you have big plans for this amazing feature, one of my favorite of Fibery. I have been digging into it more, and I realize now that it seems to only visualize relations within a hierarchy that you define within an App - so for example an “Epic” is a parent of a “Task.”
I am really hoping to see some more context that would allow me to build diagrams with:
Multiple connections illustrating relations between entities. An “extra” would be the ability to have an arrow showing the direction of the connection, although I guess this would have to be set up as a new function of relations between entities so you’d know if a relation is “pointing” from one entity to another. This could be useful for say dependencies if you build them in, or another use would be “discovered during” in the case of software - you’d have one entity pointing to another that was the “discovered” one.
Ability to use related entities as groups. As I mentioned here:
I’m hoping to group entities into “layers” based on their relations to other entities. So for example if I could group by a relation, I could see all related entities to entities in a certain Type in “layers” in the diagram. This would be super useful in a number of instances, for example product groupings of features, Customers by products that they use if a company has many of each, etc.
Thanks guys and really eager to see what’s next with Whiteboards!
Hmm, this is really interesting. I’m honestly having trouble visualizing exactly what you want to do, but I do like the idea (that I think you are articulating, in part) of more programmatic, non-destructive ways of viewing entities/things on the Whiteboard/Canvas.
I do feel like this might be tangential to base Whiteboard functionality, and difficult to get right, but also potentially quite powerful. For example ability to select an arbitrary set of Entities on the Board and perform some operation like “Group by Parent”, or “Sort by Name”, and then perform additional manual changes after that. I realize this may be a bit different than you were suggesting, but I’m more brainstorming here…
It’s a fine balance though to pick which of such features might be really powerful and frequently useful, vs. more niche and specialized. I would see these things potentially coming in some further future (1-2 yrs from now perhaps), if ever. In the meantime just the capabilities that Obsidian Canvas has and the smoothness with which it works would enable a lot, I think.