While I understand this, it also really saddens me deeply (yeah, nothing new here), @mdubakov.
To me, the ability to have entities on a whiteboard is THE killer feature that makes Fibery stand out beyond all the alternatives as they require to combine Notion, Airtable, Confluence, etc. with Whimsical or Miro and Figma.
While I LOVE how smooth Whimsical works as a tool, and they have added transclusions/deeper references in their own way, all these whiteboard tools are SHALLOW. They are digital paper. And so I can make great Whimsical document and embed them into my knowledge base tool, but it is just that, a shallow embed of a digital canvas.
In Fibery, I can place my entities. I can discuss, brainstorm, plan, architect, with the actual entities. I can build flow diagrams that contain the actual Views, Features, User Roles, API Calls, and Logging Events, not boxes. I can draw navigation maps and and funnels that contain the actual Views and Metrics between them. I can make a super-flexible Kanban board using the Whiteboard and the actual User Stories and Epics!
Well, I could do all that, if the whiteboards would be less “not top-notch”. And yes, I understand that making whiteboards work as well as they do on Whimsical is a huge task, but right now they have a lot of friction, which makes it hard for us to argue for their use and not use Whimsical/Miro.
We’ve noticed and are grateful for the improvements, but here are some of my main killers:
- Half-baked grid. The grid and snapping works basically, but is hidden away as a setting and when I zoom, the grid changes?!?!
- Buggy text fields. Pasting text does not always work. The formatting gets messed up, sometimes content disappears, etc.
- Half-baked text fields. The text fields allow for no rich text formatting (bullets, bold, etc.) and they don’t even allow me to resize the width of it
- Buggy arrows. While they have improved and now the lines can be dragged, they are still buggy and we try to avoid them as much as we can.
- Single style entity display. The way entities are displayed takes a lot of space. I would love to have the same card sizing options as with the Board view
- Slow adding of entities. I want to be able to bulk import (e.g. search and multi-select) entities so that I can make site-maps, feature maps, etc. quickly and with certainty not to forget anything.
- Framing and grouping. Grouping and moving things is still far from smooth as arrows are not included. Selecting multiple objects in a frame is a pain and deleting the frame behind deletes all the content…
And the two big ones, which we can live with for now, but would be good to have resolved:
- Commenting. I want to be able to add comments to the whiteboard (yeah, big feature), for now we make do with the post-its
- Versioning. Create named versions that we can link to
I think in terms of UI and how it works, Whimsical is the gold standard. Yes, they are dedicated to boards, but if you are looking for inspiration on how to solve certain things, they are a great example.