May 23, 2024 / Nicer inbox, Feed View, and a dozen small improvements

Scan notification inbox quicker

We’ve updated the Inbox layout to enhance readability and provide more information:

  • the name and the DB of the affected Entity is more prominent now;
  • the vague made changes label is gone in favor of specific actions;
  • you can navigate to related Entities that were linked or unlinked;

Let us know what you think!

Customize post width and visualize multiple DBs on Feed View

feed-view-post-width

We have refreshed the look of the Feed View and introduced two new features:

  • visualize multiple DBs even if their rich-text Fields have different names;
  • select a post width that is appropriate for the content displayed: Full if you’ve got a ton of wide tables and embedded Views and Narrow if there’s not much content and quick navigation is more important.

Change visualization for Fields on Entity View

display_as_action

Use the newly added Display as > context menu action to customize how a Field is displayed on Entity View: for example, show a Number Field as a progress bar or a to-many relation as a compact list.

There aren’t many visualizations yet but we’ll gradually add new ones. Most importantly, we are going to allow a compact way to display to-many relations in both layouts for a cleaner and faster Entity View.

The context menu itself has gotten some love too.

Understand when media is selected in rich text

selected-image

Images, videos, and embeds have a slight border now to distinguish them from the background. Once you select a media block, the border gets more noticeable and resize handles appear.

We have been enjoying this spontaneous update in our workspace for a week — we hope you’ll appreciate this small change too!

Save webpage’s images and formatting via browser extension

Fibery Browser Extension now saves images and preserves text formatting: headers, links, and lists.

Copy link to Whiteboard selection

Instead of painstakingly explaining to your teammates where exactly they should look on a huge Whiteboard, select the relevant area and send a link to the selection.

When they open the Whiteboard, they will see the right thing with an appropriate zoom level.

:butterfly: One-liner improvements

  • Navigation: pressing Esc doesn’t close the active View or Entity panel anymore. This behavior has brought more harm than good since it often happens accidentally.
  • List View: it’s possible to create Entities of all possible DBs via the context menu.
  • Discourse integration: Posts can now be synced to a separate DB instead of a huge rich-text Field on Topic DB. This allows to connect individual Posts to CRM data via auto-linking and score feedback priority.
  • GitHub integration: new Tag and Release DBs + SHA Field on Commit DB.
  • Map View: different Location Fields can be used for different DBs.
  • Context Views:
    • every Document and Whiteboard on Entity View doesn’t have a confusing Space selector anymore;
    • accidentally moving a re-used context View to a different Folder is now less likely.

:shrimp: Fixed Bugs

  • Browser extension: hide databases if user don’t have permissions to add entities to these databases
  • It’s impossible to place cursor in search input in Existing views and Convert to popup
  • Aggregation functions Avg, Max, and Min return 0 on an empty collection
  • Watch button is cut in resized sidebar if entity is opened in panel
  • Comment field is cut in resized sidebar if entity is opened in panel
  • Use account label on login page instead of raw account name
  • Relation list: ‘Unlink’ option should not be displayed for group
  • Input loses focus when hover over Automation Item.
  • show “/” commands that start with query first and then other matches
  • ‘Expand’ button disappears after collapsing if ‘hide empty group’ option is turned on
  • Script error on selecting disabled item in databases list
  • List view: created items do not get automatically assigned to the group they created in
11 Likes

Lovely updates this week! Happy to see the Feed view is getting some love. Within the Feed View, I would love to be able to:

  1. Sort the entities by dragging and dropping
  2. Change name of entity without needing to open side view. (Much faster)

These two things would make the feed view so much more useful and intuitive for us! Thanks!

2 Likes

Edit: All previous bugs reported are resolved. Thanks!

1 Like

I LOVE THIS. Currently, you can’t convert the URL to a mention or else that location isn’t saved. Is this a potential future upgrade or is it likely not going to be implemented with mentions?
Also the ‘Reset Default Viewport’ option on whiteboards. Was this always here?? This is awesome!

2 Likes

Really happy to see some less-focused features (Whiteboard, Feed View, Map View, even Discourse integration) get some love here! And I especially didn’t expect to see the Web Clipper extension get a useful update (sorry guys, it just didn’t seem like it was anywhere in the schedule :sweat_smile:), so that’s really nice to see as well. Great stuff!

3 Likes

I agree with Oshyan, almost like you had another slow December this week!! :turtle: But then a fast one. You know when everyone can do whatever.

Fibery gets more useful by the week. I love this. It’s the golden age of productivity tools, so much interesting things coming out, and Fibery seems like the right place to enjoy and benefit from this! :partying_face:

@RonMakesSystems Nice to see you here! Agree with your points :dart:

Btw awesome that the Map view gets some love at well :earth_africa::earth_americas::earth_asia::heart_eyes: Will dream tonight about the Fibery maps and then write some feature requests/ideas of whatever pops up :rainbow:

5 Likes

Great extensions and refinements! Thanks!

The funny thing is almost all these changes are a part of our new focus/niche release :wink: (except Map View)

4 Likes

Nice update! Especially looking forward for this one!

Not related to the inbox, but would it be possible to link directly to the automation responsible for the update in an entity (as shown in the activity log). Sometimes something gets changed that shouldn’t. Since we have many automations, it can be a puzzle to figure out which automation is causing this update.

image

3 Likes

This is a good idea! You should pop it out as a feature request so I can pop a vote on it :slight_smile:

‘Key Features Progress Update’ suggestion

I like the new features, although they are again in my view superficial in relation to the permissions limitation, which makes Fibery still not suitable for even regular team role permissions. For that reason in our organizations we still waiting for that before actually using Fibery in production.

My problem with the development of Fibery, is that I find it not transparent in what is being worked at, so every week is like a birthday where we hope we get what we want.

What I would suggest, is that the team can post here weekly progress updates about especially the very relevant features.

I understood from @mdubakov that there is only one developer working at that and that he was the last months focused on the relationships entity feature. I understand that is indeed important seen the new strategic product focus of Fibery 2.0, but the question arises why only one person for such fundamental need, permissions, a necessity for teams which one would have expected to be in place already?

What exactly are you missing?

A person in Team A should be able to create and edit certain records related to Team A’s projects but should not be able to view Team B’s records. So access template capabilities should extend to creating new records.

For example, three common team roles that require Create Permission without full Space Access:

  • Team managers to create tasks for their team, but not see tasks of other teams,
  • Financial officers to create their team’s financial records, not see records of other teams,
  • HR personnel to handle sensitive employee data specific to their team, not of other teams.

Creation rights ensure fused workflow, enhances data privacy, and complies with role-based access control (RBAC) principles, thereby increasing productivity and maintaining strict information security, which helps align with data protection laws like GDPR, HIPAA, and others.

The absence of this in Fibery currently forces a team to have:

  • Its own isolated Space :scream:
  • Its own set of duplicated databases like projects, tasks, financial data, user data, :scream:
    effectively requiring duplication of structures across the organization, which becomes overly complex and in reality not an option for production organizations.

See also: Exploring private data management in Fibery - #10 by Yuri_BC

Nice updates!

Really nice :star_struck::star_struck: Looking forward to the many relations!

Is it possible that the browser extension only works well when your field name is actually ‘description’?

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Our workspace is in Dutch, we don’t use description for rich text fields. Would be a bummer if we can’t use the browser extension :sweat_smile:

1 Like

At the moment, yes, unfortunately.

1 Like

Lovely as always :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes:

To add from our use cases:

  • People needing to see and create contracts/contract requests, but not have any access to other contracts.
  • Study Managers to create Studies and Study Participants (with sensitive personal data), but only see their own studies and participants thereof.

I think my problem there is just Entity-based access not being considered in Forms.

Exactly this.

1 Like

It’s on our radar! We have noticed three similar link-to-mention use cases so far:

  1. Preserve anchor when mentioning a Document
  2. Preserve selection when mentioning a Whiteboard
  3. Preserve context when mentioning a context View

If you have the fourth one, please let me know.

3 Likes

Makes sense! We’ve even tried to tweak this but it turned out to be more challenging than we expected. We’ll likely give it another try at some point.

3 Likes

Thanks for the use cases!
You’ll be able to specify who can create Entities of a particular Database as a part of the DB access — coming this year.

1 Like