Q: What are your top 3 missing things/features in Fibery?

Yes, I can definitely see the benefit. And… I’m ashamed to admit, but now that I know there is a quick filter there, I feel better about it all being in one place. What I’ll say is that, maybe it’s a minority of people that would fall into my camp, but the simple fact is I just didn’t see or understand the quick filter for what it was in ClickUp. :smile: I’ve never taken the time to thoroughly read through ClickUp docs, only piecemeal as I felt the need, and this is something so fundamental and basic that in most apps I wouldn’t feel the need to. So I find it interesting I missed it. And again I wonder if this is just an issue for a small minority of people, or if it’s a problem they should solve. The fact that the filter only shows on-hover of an otherwise blank space was for me an issue in its discoverability, however I can understand why it would be like that too…

Anyway, with a good implementation of dynamic filtering (an example for me would be the ability to set the default filter state per-user!), I agree an “all activity inclusive of comments” approach is probably ideal.

My top three wants:

Polymorphic relations. When creating relation, ability to have many Types from which to choose, and not just one Type

Merge Comments and References in one common Stream for better flow

In day-to-day use of Fibery, this would make it much easier to see the key activity around an entity, which is when a user takes the time to comment, or refer, to an entity IMO.

Auto-Generate linked diagrams in Whiteboard

I have not used whiteboards much due to the lack of this feature. Just for comparison’s sake, ClickUp can do this with Mind Maps, but it is a much more primitive diagramming solution that Whiteboard in Fibery. Still, if you have tasks linked in ClickUp, they will show up in the mind map as such.

Thanks!

2 Likes

I’m starting to think the merging of Comments, and yes References, into Activity Stream with really accessible, quick filtering might be the way to go? Including perhaps defaults per-Database, possibly.

and of course earlier in this topic:

1 Like

Hey, appreciate the response. I have been meaning to respond to this comment of yours:

I can see where this might not be for everyone, but I actually like the ability to look in on an activity stream around an entity and see all the activity being done - status changed, comments made, due dates adjusted, and in the case of Fibery - references. In the case of Fibery though it’s harder for the average user to see this since you have to hit the “clock” icon and some of my users cannot get it in their head to remember that is what that icon is for. When the activity stream is right next to the entity and “hits you in the face,” you are forced to look at it, and thus see what’s been going on. This is actually useful in my case as I have a lot of project-type db’s and have found it would be better for those juggling multiple projects if they could see the activity right away, because what happens is they will at times go in and repeat stuff that’s already been done around an project entity, then have to be reminded that it’s already in the activity stream. For example, a due date was updated, with a comment as to why the change was made, but another user comes in and questions that because they can’t see at a glance the update in the first place. The original person changing the due date has to go in and comment back, reminding the person of the original change.

If there was a customizable way to display different types of activity on the entity card with quick filtering, so in the case of my request that you cited of Merge Comments and References in one common Stream for better flow, then yes this would be very good! Just to explain the use case once more, with Fibery’s excellent # tagging, which means you can type and reference anything else in Fibery in one click, you get a kind of “shortcut” to making updates when you reference an entity in another entity. An example - I have three tasks assigned to me of similar nature. I comment in the one task that I finished this task, and the other 2 while I was at it. I reference those other 2. If References and Comments were in one chronological stream, the other 2 tasks I did would pick up these references at the “top” of their stream, so anybody coming to read them would see the reference as the most recent update. Now in Fibery, my users are conditioned to reading comments to try to see if there’s an update, because this is the default way you look for updates in just about any app that supports comments - GitHub, SalesForce, Jira, etc. etc. If the reference I just did shows up right there at the top of the area where comments are, they will see that I updated all three tasks in one fell swoop, and you have a very effective tool here that only Fibery offers among all the other apps out there! Right now though, with Comments their own separate element on entities, I can’t get this benefit without having to say again and again to my users to “always read both comments and references on your entities,” but they still don’t do that, I think because it’s simply unnatural to them!

I feel like there is support for this (in the public roadmap among other places) so I look forward to seeing what the team will be doing. Evolving references like this really give Fibery an added edge when looking at the Roam/Notion/Coda environment and pulling together some of what those tools offer in isolation.

1 Like

This is a very interesting and well explained outline of problems and possible solutions, etc. Thanks! I agree at a minimum that Activity History is far too hidden/not discoverable right now. I am warming more and more to the idea of merging it with Comments based on this and other recent discussion.

So I am now particularly keen to hear how @mdubakov and other staff are currently feeling about this kind of stuff. Is their current intended future direction/work along similar lines, or do they have different ideas about how to solve the same problems, or are even still “working the problems” to satisfactory internal ideas. I’d be interested to hear an update regardless of whether such changes would be happening soon or not very soon at all. :smile:

Top 3 at the moment:

  • ad hoc formulas in views - or in fact at least ability to use ad hoc lookups without having to create a separate field. In our project we restrict number of creators, but still would like people to configure their own views (to be able to explore and collect their own insights).
  • history of view changes - it’s pretty easy at the moment for people to override each other changes or to forget (or not even know) who changed what and when. We specifically restrict view management to small number of people - which can be difficult as it is creating bottlenecks, but the alternative is too much chaos.
  • paginated search (or an equivalent workaround) - with a lot of content and some frequently occurring keywords the limit of 60 search results is well… very limiting (especially in the context of product management)
1 Like

It sounds like these two things are somewhat in opposition, no?
Would it make sense to encourage users to create whatever views they would like in My Space, but not allow views in other Spaces to be changed?

seems like a sticking plaster fix for a fundamental challenge with permissions.
It wouldn’t stop people from messing up shared views, only allow you to retrospectively attempt to revert changes.

1 Like

Perhaps I wasn’t too clear - that’s exactly what we do now. When I said “would like people to configure their own views” I meant “My space”. And when I said “we specifically restrict view management to small number of people” - I meant global workspace.

Ability to configure views in “My space” is unfortunately only limited to whatever fields have been exposed to them.

In the context of my team doesn’t seem like “sticking a plaster fix” - that’s exactly how software version control works. You have collective code ownership with ability to see the history of who changed what when.

History of view changes does stop people messing up shared views - as when I notice that my friend John added a column yesterday I can go to them and ask what is the purpose of that column. And even so - I wouldn’t downplay ability to retrospectively reverting changes - as knowing who removed “my favourite and the most useful column” is a pretty good start of a conversation (compared to not knowing who might I need to talk to).

I understand what you’re saying, but I guess I don’t see views as being analogous with source code. I can see why seeing the history of an entity is really useful, but I would hope that views would not need regular changes/updates in the long term.

When you say, “added a column…what is the purpose of that column” do you mean, “added a new field…what is the purpose of that field”?
Or do you really mean column?

Because, the way I see it, showing/hiding a particular field may come down to personal preference (for which My Space is a great solution).

Whereas if someone truly thinks a new field is needed (e.g. a lookup) then should your friend John be allowed to do this? Limiting this capability to Creators (following suitable round table discussion if needed) may actually be advisable, otherwise the database could get ‘polluted’ with loads of fields of which only a small subset is actually used/useful for any given user (though not necessarily the same subset).

Perhaps this is related to the idea you were getting at with ‘ad hoc formulas in views’? If this means something like ‘per-user fields’ then that’s a really interesting proposal :thinking: but I’m not sure it would be on the radar any time soon.

1 Like

Ask me tomorrow and maybe it’s different! But tonight at 2100…

  1. ability to write dates in fluent formats (e.g. tomorrow at 7, 1h tomorrow at 1300, etc)
  2. ability to watch an entity (and not be assigned to it)
  3. ability to visualise permissions (currently a black box)
2 Likes

Have you taken a look at mu Tripetto SDK recommendation?
If this was integrated, much in the way Viziydrop was integrated, it would be an incredibly powerful way to create interfaces and conditional logic in data entry.

Many of us end up using apps like JotForm and Typeform just to get around the interface of apps like Airtable and Google Sheets. A robust form creation & chatbot app covers a wide range of uses.

2 Likes

In general, I think a meta layer is important: describing what fields are for, how tables fit together, etc. I.e. it should be possible to make structures in Fibery directly self-documenting (i.e. not in a page talking generally about the workspace, but directly on fields etc.).

3 Likes

Asana’s My Tasks view allows you to organize your assigned tasks in a way that makes sense to you. It’s one area that’d be a downgrade if my team moved from Asana to Fibery, so I’d love to see something equivalent supported by Fibery.

Within My Space you can create views of Tasks (or any other data) in whatever way makes sense for you. I’m not deep into Asana, but I don’t immediately see anything that’s not possible in Fibery in this regard.

1 Like

Here’s my current My Tasks view in Asana. The board lanes (circled in orange) are private to me, and they aren’t part of the tasks’ public fields nor any projects. In Fibery, it seems like I can only pick public fields as board rows or columns.

Board lanes in Asana are just groups of tasks (called sections), not assembled from a task field, so its implementation is probably simpler than per-user fields.

Screenshot of the list view of My Tasks, which is grouped by section

Per-user fields would still be useful for adding personally meaningful marks to tasks. I use the FVP method to choose which task to work on when it gets overwhelming, but since that kind of workflow isn’t supported by Asana, I write down my task list in Notion to be able to attach marks to tasks (which involves just prefixing task names with a dot ‘.’). This particular use case could be doable without a full-fledged per-user fields: allow users to favorite entities with a shortcut key and make favorited entities visually distinct.

1 Like

Well, the images you show (putting tasks into groups that you define) effectively imply per-user properties. I guess you could call these ‘fields’ or something else (folders, sections, groups, tags) but either way, it’s not something that’s in the works, sorry.

However, Fibery does allow you to mark items (or views) as Favourites, and they will show up in your Favourite section, as well as being indicated with a star.

As a side note, perhaps this topic is of interest?

@Chr1sG - I think we are already 90% of the way to being able to do what @ento wants, with the existing Card view:

  1. Create a new Task States DB to represent all the various custom States (Columns) that a Task can have. The entities in this States DB represent the various States that a Task can be in – i.e. the Columns that anyone might want to use in a Tasks Card View.

  2. Tasks get a new many-to-many relation to this Task States DB

  3. Make a Tasks Rule to automatically link the appropriate Task State(s) to each Task.

  4. We need the capability for Card views to Filter Columns by a To-Many relation - entities (ROWS) can currently be filtered by a to-many relation, but COLUMNS cannot.
    Card view can already filter which Task States (Columns) should be displayed, via the manually-applied “Hide Column” option – but this capability needs to be extended to the My Filters / Columns section so it can be customizable per-User.

  5. Additionally, a manual re-ordering of the Card view Columns should optionally be remembered per-user.

Ah, found the star button! The order of favorite items in the sidebar appears to be the order in which you clicked on the button, which might be fine for my use case. I’ll try using that for task tracking.

It just occurred to me that I could make a private Space with a personal status database with a 1:n relationship to tasks. Then, I can make a board that pulls in tasks I’m interested in and set the columns to use the status database. Tasks without a personal status will show up in the “No Status” lane. However, having been purely a solo user of Fibery, I’m not sure how relations to a database in a private Space will show up on the shared Space side to collaborators.

A database of personal notes and other fields could be done similarly with a 1:1 relationship set up against the task database. However, in this case, I’m not seeing an ergonomic way of creating a view that shows all tasks that don’t yet have a corresponding row in the notes database and also shows fields from the notes database. I don’t know if I’d put this as one of my top 3 missing features in Fibery, but being able to extend an existing database in an ad-hoc throwaway manner could be potentially powerful…? (Unless it’s already possible of course; I’ve been dipping in and out of Fibery and haven’t explored all its features nor kept up with the feature releases.)

1 Like

What other users can see/do depends on their permissions. If your space is ‘No access’ for everybody else, they won’t see your ‘personal status’ entities.
https://the.fibery.io/@public/User_Guide/Guide/Access-overview-86

You can use a filter (on any view) to show only tasks that are not yet linked to a ‘note’ entity.

Not sure what you’re trying to achieve.
If you do filter to show only tasks that do not have a linked note, then what is the point of showing fields from the note database? I mean, you can create lookup fields in the task database to show fields from the linked ‘note’ but they will be empty :thinking: