Whiteboard improvements ideas 💫

[Renato_Carvalho]

Hi guys, I’m sharing below a few ideas of improvements on the Whiteboard tool.

I’ve been using Whimsical for years and there are a lot of great stuff there.

At the same time, there are a lot of great stuff in Fibery Whiteboard. The possibility to reduce the amount of tools is awesome. The possibility to add entities and make the Whiteboard alive is really awesome. I’m already structuring my processes inside Fibery Whiteboard. It’s already usable. With a few ideas below, I guess it could be even better.

Add Pill Shape option
This is a great visual aid for processes that would be awesome if it could be added.

Faster pan movement / sensitivity
When I compare the panning movement to other whiteboards, Fibery seems slower. It gives me an impression that the Whiteboard is slow. However, it looks like it’s only a sensitivity configuration. It would be awesome if it could be a bit faster.

Improve padding on Diamond Shape that sometimes get too close tho the border
Fibery:

Whimsical:

Sometimes the shapes will use the “wrong text color”

Hold “Z” and Right Click / Left Click on Whiteboard to to Zoom On / Zoom Out
Like in Whimsical, holding the keyboard “Z” and Left click will Zoom In. Them same would happen for holding the keyboard “Z” and Right click will Zoom Out.

Snap to Grid and Show Guides by default
I noticed this is not the default standard configuration, however, any whiteboard out there starts with those options on. I even thought Fibery didn’t have these features, but then I realized I could torn them on.

Anyway, having to turn them on every single time is a bit annoying.

As soon as I get more ideas, I’ll share with you

Thanks for the Whiteboard.

[bear]

These are some good ideas from Whimsical that you bring, and explain very well! I agree that all of these would be steps forward.

Also agree that the Whiteboard is good already, it has seen quite some improvement in the last year, but nice to see how things keep developing - and I believe ideas like these are helpful!

[njyo]

Whiteboard improvements I’m always a fan of.
Overall I agree, just with the grid, as I posted elsewhere, I would prefer to have a better one and have it all turned on, and snapping turned off. With a good grid, snapping is quite superfluous.

Thanks!

[alex]

Thank you for your helpful feedback, and to be honest, I already have half of this on my list

[Renato_Carvalho]

Thank you so much! I knew you all would figure it out.

Keep up the amazing work! I haven’t been this excited about software in a long time, and Fibery has really sparked that passion again.

[njyo]

Hi all,

I hope that @Renato_Carvalho and @Alex don’t mind that I’m adding here some more whiteboard refinements:

1. Improved Export: Currently, there are still some problems like that the Sections are more flimsy than I’d like and that the PNG export just exports what I currently see. So I’d love to see theses improvements:
   1. Export full whiteboard as PDF: Vectors are great for diagrams thanks to infinite zooming and smaller file size. I’d like the default to be an export of the full whiteboard as PDF. And of course, please crop the diagram to remove any empty whitespace.
   2. Export full whiteboard as PNG: As a stop-gap before PDF export, I’d like the default PNG export to export the full whiteboard at 100%, rather than the current viewport. I have many large process flows and current viewport means either I can see the whole flow, or I can read the text, but not both. Also, if I want to export the current viewport, I can just take a screenshot. Also, please crop away any empty whitespace.
   3. Select items and export: Sometimes I want to just export parts of my diagram. As the Sections don’t work well for me, I would like to just select some areas and then be able to choose to export those. Ideally without grouping, just select and use the context menu to export.
   4. Cursors should not export: It seems strange to me that a diagram export would contain my and other people’s cursors
2. Improved Viewport: Using the Whiteboards in two main modes: embedded and expanded (NEVER full screen) and the viewport and Fit to screen are crucial for this. However, they work suboptimal.
   1. Embedded view UI elements: I like the recent embed cleanup, but the Locked and Zoom UI elements still cover parts of my diagrams. Especially Locked being top left is often where the most crucial information is. I would prefer it to be part of the embed frame as a padlock icon.
   2. Fit to screen to centre rather than top-align: Using Reset viewport is great to anchor the diagram, especially after a Fit to screen. Sadly, fit to screen places the diagram to the top, rather the centre of the screen and the moment I scroll up, the diagram often moves horizontally. So centring the diagram rather than top-aligning will make these two alignments great for embeds and diagrams.
   3. Viewport should zoom to fit space available: Right now, the default viewport is the same across all screens if embedded of stand-alone. That means that if I reset my viewpoint for full-screen viewing, the embedded view only shows a part and if I reset the viewport for the embed, the expanded view shows me a tiny diagram. Instead, I think the viewport should zoom in and out to fill the available screen estate. Feels conceptually and practically more natural.
3. Locked embeds should not pan (or zoom): With 3.2 fixed, then the embedded mode can be used as a preview of the diagram in a page. Far too often when scrolling past the page I end up panning or zooming the embed. Instead, the embed should be fixed IMHO, and if I want to explore further, then I can expand it (in classic Fibery fashion or a light-box if you will). A well-handled embed viewport will contain all I need and a click in for more detail will be fine.
4. Whiteboard “themes”: We have a few different types of whiteboards: Flows, swim lanes, entity relationships, etc. which have slightly different preferences in terms of “Show relations”, “grid” and even fonts, colours, arrows, etc. I would like to be able to:
   1. Set default diagram style: Now as the grid has improved so much, it is the default means to make a neat diagram. At the same time “Show relations” is almost always immediately turned off and line shapes are changed to orthogonal. I would like to set the defaults for my workspace rather than doing these changes each time. Especially, as they don’t seem to save with the whiteboard if closed and opened again. I’m happy for this to be a simple XML/JSON config file that I can edit.
   2. Allow for multiple named presets: If I can configure the default diagram style, I’d love to define a few named presents, so that I can easily choose in the beginning of a diagram, which preset I want to use as my flow, swim lane or entity diagrams will all be slightly different.
5. Move “Show relations” into context menu: Not sure how “Show relations” has survived the cleanup and was not moved into the same menu as “Show grid” and “Show guides”. I don’t think this is something most users will toggle a lot, but based on diagram it will be on or off.

Thanks for reading and considering! I hope that most of these won’t be massive features, but they will remove a lot more of friction that I experience when white boarding.

Many thanks!

[mdubakov]

Some new shapes dropped today

October 3, 2024 / Quick filters on relation and embedded views, Clean email body, Automations Script AI Assistant, and more

In today’s release we added several improvements to recently released features and made a first step to AI Automations assistant. This is the recent feedback we’ve got from one our customer and it generated a lot of dopamine for our team, just want to share it with you as well. I’m deeply impressed by the technical design of Fibery — you guys seem to make excellent trade-offs and design decisions, preferring to add more powerful & simple higher-level abstractions, rather than special-case feat…

[Renato_Carvalho]

You guys are awesome!

[mdubakov]

Spread the word about us! We need more customers like you

[Oshyan]

Several of these seem big enough that they should be their own separate Feature Requests. They’re going to get lost here, not be vote-able, etc.

[njyo]

I haven’t had available votes for ages.

But you are right, @Oshyan, the question is, how does the Fibery team want to manage this to be helpful for them.

[Oshyan]

@njyo

I haven’t had available votes for ages.

This is a problem I wrote also about here:

Done Feature Requests are not being moved to release votes!

I just noticed today that I have eight Feature Request votes in “[Done]” (text appended to the title) state that are still taking up my votes. Wtf guys? I understand some might be awaiting feedback and not truly done, but some are not, for example the whole “Implement GPT” thread: [DONE] GPT3 implementation in Fibery (share your ideas and cases)