Please read through this and give a vote if you agree with this brilliant idea (brilliant - but not my idea) for a search that would be a massive boost for Fibery. Images of before and proposed after included.
I have figured out one of the main things I’m struggling with regarding Fibery, which I love but which I want to be better: search.
Here’s a small sample of my search results for “fibery” in my workspace:
I have absolutely no idea how to find what I’m looking for in Fibery. In fact, I find myself making Index pages to manually track things. Search is much too basic and ineffective.
This is likely exacerbated by me using it as the workspace owner, so I see everything, but still.
Why is this search ineffective and user-unfriendly, and more importantly, how could it go from unhelpful to amazing?!??!
- First, as you can see in the image above there is a good size vertical scrollbar showing that there are many more entities to go through.
- More importantly, I have virtually no context. I might TRY to use the UUID to determine what’s recent and what’s not, but I’ve found that it only works within one table.
- There’s no date - I don’t know what’s old and what’s new.
- I don’t know what’s from where, unless I go through each one individually. If I go one-by-one I can see the table it’s from (badge and subheading) and that’s it.
- I can only filter by one item (e.g. table or view, etc) or from one space, so in order to accomplish my current goal, I have to repeat a certain process six or eight times.
- Or, I can try to emulate YVettte (Ninja fibery workaround specialist) and build a hack. But alas, in order to actually use search, I have to try to figure out scripting myself - and my brain just can’t do it.
To me, this is a massive problem with search, which I have come to the conclusion is by far Fibery’s biggest shortcoming by a million miles.
To show why it’s so ineffective, let me tell you about a program called X1. I have no affiliation with X1 but I used it for a while. It’s kind of a power search application. Also and somewhat coincidentally, I have been obsessively looking for (and trying) the ideal search app going on a few years now - prior to AI - and while you can do a ton with AI - you need to have a solid foundation first.
While X1 is not really very good in 2023 (it doesn’t integrate well with a multitude of external cloud apps or ipass which others do), it was a super helpful search when I used it. I think it has morphed into a legal forensics search tool, that’s how good it was. I especially had to use it a few times when it was a life-saver: once for a lawsuit where I had to go through tons of data, another time for a very large enterprise customer who had a lawsuit and I needed to find data on his behalf. Both times it was private and confidential so I had to do it myself. I also used it routinely for everyday use.
It was lightning fast - it let you hone down your search in ways intuitive to you (the user) and considering how you’d set up your files, documents, and database.
What’s interesting is that X1 is laid out just like a Fibery Grid, with one main UI adjustment/difference which is a box/filter on every column header. I can envision Fibery looking like the image below, with these search capabilities listed from most important to less important:
- You can filter on each column in a combined manner across multiple columns. So, you could select 4 Types from 5 databases from a 2-year period, etc.
- You can save your searches (illustrated in the left panel) and one-click get to them.
- Indexing would make it lighting fast and be done on a regular basis. (Once a night was more than enough for me when using X1).
- Search results would be updated as you type.
- You could include or exclude columns/filters in a way each user likes - maybe you don’t want to see so many columns. Also, you may want a command popup so the view with that would be more minimal, but I used a search tool (forget which one) that did that across apps yet retained the advanced filtering and saved searches, I’ll see if I can track that down.
6. You could have multiple different views. For me, Grid is most important, but you could have lists and others too.
7. In the event you do incorporate YAML sometime, it would work with that.
(Trying to pare down features to make this doable per Oshyan.)
You could also have global search options that work for all searches and themselves be customized (but more as a one-time thing than ongoing).
X1 was by far the most effective search I’d ever used. It helped me accomplish things much faster, including on occasions where I had to function more like a forensic tech than anything else.
And it seems to “fit” with the Fibery looks & feel and philosophy.
In the above example I show a filter dropdown on Type column, a column I created. Each of the columns would have a filter, including the Database Badge and Created By (avatar) which I left out of my screenshot. This would let you include/exclude, find or ignore to your heart’s content, and again, when a program used this method (X1), it became invaluable to me.
Fixed.