New way of displaying: show as floating cards

Not as a view, but alternative to sidebar or modal style that allow multiple entities to stay open at once.

Not sure how to solve the fact that it has so much stuff and two columns, possibly toggle what you want to see like in views and have it in single column?

My coworkers often have to compare entities, so they at the moment they navigate back and forth or open multiple tabs.

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This is a big feature of Roam - you simply click “shift” when selecting a Page, and it pops out on the side, so you have a side-by-side view.

Notion is apparently working on this too:

I definitely could see where this would be useful.

Interesting. I have several thoughts on this.

First, the video you show really looks like a whiteboard and could just be another feature or type of that. You can already add a Card for an Entity, it just doesn’t show much data. If you could customize that data maybe that would do it.

That said, I don’t think it’s necessarily the best way to enable this on a global basis and make it flexible. So I’m wondering if the full drag-and-drop layout flexibility is necessary, or just one idea for how to accomplish the stated goal of “comparing entities”.

What this makes me think of is the “sidebar” (or just multiple entity windows) that some of the note-taking apps have, like Roam or Obsidian. Obsidian has a particularly good implementation where you can have unlimited columns and there is a whole set of features around managing columns, linking them together, splitting each window, pinning, etc. But I digress.

Fibery already has such a mode! It just doesn’t actually work they way I would want it to. Currently it basically puts your entity view on the side in a different single-column layout. This could handle your need, I would think, however the opened entity seems to disappear as you navigate around and I haven’t found a way to show two entities this way. The one area where the current functionality seems to be useful is in Documents (and maybe Whiteboards), where you can have the Entity View open in the sidebar and not cover your document, continue scrolling/reading your doc, and reference the Entity on the side if you want. But this too is a “fragile” state, if you click on the doc edit area the sidebar Entity view goes away.

The way I imagine it, the sidebar could do a couple of things, some of which ought to solve your problem.

First, be persistent, i.e. at least have an option that the Entity opened in the sidebar doesn’t go away if you click on the doc view, or even if you click to a totally different View, Entity, whatever. In other words, a “pin” or just “persistent” mode.

Second, you should be able to have an Entity viewed in the main “full” view, and the sidebar at the same time.

Third, there should be a hotkey that lets you open an Entity in the sidebar by default. In other words, where a normal left-click would open the entity in a pop-up, an Alt-left-click (e.g.) would open it in the sidebar.

This also suggests the sidebar should not be a “mode” of the entity view but rather its own UI pane that content can be opened into. Again this is similar to Roam, Obsidian, and others, and is very useful (as @B_Sp has pointed out, beating me to the punch! :smile:).

The last thing I’d like to see, although it’s not a must, is another Roam-like feature which is that the sidebar would allow multiple entities to be open at once, listed in reverse chronological order in a vertically scrollable view, and separated by some obvious delineator. You could then open any number of Entities there and scroll through them and, ideally, even collapse them. Again exactly like Roam. It’s incredibly useful there, and if “sidebar” were turned into a full UI pane and feature, it could be very useful here too.

Also I think having the Collapsible sidebar would go well with this for making more info of an Entity easily viewable on less wide screens (I am on 4k, so not so much of a problem for me :smile:)

So if some or all of that were implemented, would it meet your goals @Haslien?

I’m speaking on behalf of my coworkers, so I can’t say with certainty how they would want it, but I will try.

  • Card view is great, but you can’t edit anything directly from it. Pros and cons to this, so it’s not just a bad thing that you can’t.
  • Nor can you show the textarea where a lot of crucial information also resides on our end. I know you can put things in your own fields and show them, but the amount of fields we’d need then would be ridiculous with most of the fields switching between being useless.
  • Most of us work off of information from the same Type, but what aspects are important to us and which layout is the most efficient vary among us. I created a folder with personal views for each person. Me and two others use table views, the rest use kanban view, so relying on kanban view in of itself doesn’t really alleviate it.
  • A big one being images inside textarea, since we paste in partial screenshots from Windows+Shift+S, which also mean uploading image as a file is not really viable replacement later either if you can show images in card view that is from attached files.
  • The number of entities opened has not really any upper limit, but I can imagine it being 2, 5, possibly even twice that, but again no upper limit. This means as columns, especially on lower resolution screens, would be too narrow. They’d have to be able to overlap each other as floating cards. Only me and one other have 2.5K screens, but of us two I’m the only one that have it as a secondary screen. The rest use 1920×1080 px.
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I got the problem, but not sure about solution. There are many options, like extend card view on a Whiteboard with more details and even description, Feed View where you can scroll and see entities descriptions, etc. We’ll think about that in future, problem does exist.

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Pop-up windows id say. Could be a toggeable setting, an option when right clicking/dropdown menu on an entity… but would work best with an assigned shortcut, so say shift clicking an entity would open it as a popup window.

They could be resizeable as well as ‘minimizeable’.

I can see minimizing working in two ways:
-mini-bar/card
something like OPs, suggestion, would be the window disappearing all but its header bar (where title already appears, the colored top)

-botton/top icon/button
similar to the chat bubble (circular green at the botton), wich upon clicking have feedback and search.
Whenever the first popup window is minimized instead of closed it pops the button, and clicking on it would show a list of every minimized entity

Something like this is a must in my opnion. I use content side to side on every app i use, and in most without any such features i resort to opening a new window/view (in web apps a new browerse window) and have to alt-tab between then or squeeze the browser windows side to side thenselves

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