Thanks for your candid reply, @mdubakov!
As I emphasised feel in my message, I really meant that. The team has definitely been firing from all cylinders, and I’m excited to see where Fibery 2.0 lands. Even though we are not a product development company with 100+ people. Then again, I believe that many of especially the refinements are things that will tighten the product for all.
This may also just be a matter of balance between big features vs smaller refinements. Especially on the smaller refinements (e.g. quick navigation fixes) this that address annoyances, it would be good to have a way to vote for what to be added next. And, sadly, I’ve run out of votes on the FRQ forum like ages ago.
In other words, besides the major workpieces being added for Fibery 2.0, I think it would be great for us as the fan user community to have a bit of an ability to direct the refinements that will make it in. If you had a section of “small refinements” that we can suggest, your team vets and removes anything too large and then lets us prioritise and that slowly gets added one-by-one, that would give us some agency, which builds excitement and a feeling of connection.
Apologies, that may have been harsh, considering that whiteboards have gotten a good amount of love and refinements over time and have gotten significantly better since these days. Apologies.
What I did mean though, is that the Whiteboard still has a long way to go to be at the same level of quality as the rest of the tool. I force myself to use it, but my team still often escapes to Whimsical, which hurts, as you can imagine. Here a short list of what’s still cumbersome:
- Sections and lines: These have become better but are still iffy
- Sections don’t work reliably when moving them. Unless the section is placed first and then everything else is drawn on top of it, it is unreliable when moving. Also, resizing sections is difficult, but connecting them is easy.
- Lines between objects have improved but often enough mess up when moving things and add additional corners so that we still try to avoid them as much as possible
- Lines should enable having labels on them. Not having these just makes things much more cumbersome.
- Entity relations display should be a default setting… or maybe as Whimsical have “whiteboard types” that have some default settings toggled.
- Grid and guides: The grid has improved much functionally, even if visually still a bit crude.
- New objects added do not default to sizes that match the grid.
- No setting to default to showing and snapping to grid. So every whiteboard I need to first toggle them on. Also, What’s the point of showing a grid without snapping?
- Besides a grid, having alignment guides would be super helpful
- The grid steps are generally too small to be useful as it’s hard to align items with the grid (to be fair, this is hard, and I think only OmniGraffle has solved this well)
- Rich text: While being able to change the font is neat, I honestly do not need more than one font, but I need rich text:
- Choosing one default compact font rather than Arial would be useful. Or at max, the ability toi swap between narrow and regular width.
- What I want to be able to do is have specific words bold, italic or having numbered and bulleted lists. Like this, everything is the same text or then I need to create more objects.
- There is left, centre, right alignment but not top, centre or bottom alignment?
- Mentioning people is not possible…
- Comments vs Sticky Notes: The lack of first-class comments requires us to use post-its. A very crude work-around.
Overall the visual refinement is just steps behind the rest of Fibery and as such will also make the whole thing feel just much worse than what it actually is.
And yes, I’m super happy with the bulk import of entities and the general deep linking of the entities that you provide, as I said many times, IMHO that’s one of the key differentiators from any other tools like JIRA or Linear etc.
Not sure what all the things mean, but here’s my quick take:
- Introduce Database access → Not sure what this means, but I assume that yes, this is important
- Dependency management is missing → Ditto
- Allow non-Admins to create automation Rules → Not critical but surely important for larger organisations. In the end, I’d rather give somebody rights to make automations on a given database even if that means that they’d be DB admin.
- Workflow 2.0: track cycle time and changes history → Sounds useful, but not critical to me
- Quick filters and search in Views → Dunno. The one thing I want here that I had mentioned was to be able to disable filters and searches rather than deleting them
- Rich-text formulas → Sounds nice, but not critical to me. On the other hand, there are a number of formula and automation limitations that feel limiting right now. That said, if this means more markdown support, then cool!
- Validation rules → Not sure what that is…
- WYSIWYG editor instead of plain text templates in automations → Not sure what this entails
- Templates per Database → Not sure what that is… what I do know that I want with databases now is multiple inheritance
- Automatically provide access to assigned and linked Users → YES!
- Structured search (with filters and custom sorting) is missing → maybe yes. The search is currently not super helpful unless I search very specifically
- Groups in List View, Table View and Smart Folders → Hmm, to me a better board view limits my work much more (can’t find my other FRQ)…
- Rename workspace (change the URL) → YES! We’ve been waiting for this for ages
- No good way to capture similar Databases → I think multiple inheritance solves this
- Users are worried about entities limits & performance → Dunno what this is
- Creator doesn’t understand how permissions/access are applied to other … → YES! And having the View as Different Role/User as well as the Admin toggle here would be amazing!
- Filter, sort, and color-code using formula (ad-hoc calculation) → YES!
- Calendar (dates) as integration template → Sounds useful, yes
- Polymorphic relations are missing → YES! YES! YES! YES!
- Customize Fields that update Modification Date → Maybe, not sure
Thanks for reading, happy to discuss more and hope it helps!
And as always, thanks for all the hard work to you and the whole team! 