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:
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
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!
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Cursors should not export: It seems strange to me that a diagram export would contain my and other people’s cursors
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Not quite sure if all the whiteboard improvement ideas should be logged into this thread, but posting some ideas here that I suspect are relatively simple to add
Ability to make shapes the same size. Mural does it pretty well.
Returning to the Whiteboard after many months of not using it due to rough edges, and I thought there was a polishing pass released within the last 6-12 months so…
Nope, still feels janky. Undo doesn’t work after creating a connecting arrow, and creating connecting arrows feels - to me - far too easy/prioritized. I’ll get used to the latter, but Ctrl-Z has gotta let me fix accidental stuff creation, otherwise it’s maddening. Totally interrupts “flow”, which for me is a lot of what the Whiteboard is about.
Also can’t use Left-Align and Top-Align for text simultaneously unless I select them in a specific order? And the indicator for which alignment mode is selected can also be broken fairly easily. This is stuff that I noticed within 5 mins of trying to use the Whiteboard for an incredibly simple mindmapping/decision tree exercise, not using fancy formatting, object alignment, or really any newer features.
My experience previously using the Whiteboard is that it was trivial and almost immediate to find some bug or issue, to the point where it felt exhausting to try to report them all, and I had little faith they’d be fixed in a timely fashion. So I didn’t report them. And I was right about them not being fixed quickly either.
I’m not trying to be overly harsh, I’m just amazed that Whiteboard has remained behind all other areas of Fibery as far as the general UX, the feeling of “trust” I have with this particular area of the product. It’s a real bummer. Don’t get me wrong the Calendar view is also, well… very basic and needs work. But at least it works consistently for what it does do, I use it daily. There is something different about how Whiteboard has been handled, random features have been added but not in a state of polish, that perhaps is one clear difference vs. other feature areas IMO. Something to think about…
I know that Whiteboard is coming back into focus and I urge you one thing above all else: make it work smoothly and consistently first, then add features. It hasn’t yet achieved a baseline level of feature polish on what it already does IMO.
Thanks for you feedback. We have an issue with Undo behavior on the whiteboard and we’ll fix it soon. Could you tell me a bit more about text alignment? I checked, and it seems to be working correctly — it applies to a specific type of object, just like in other tools (e.g., Miro). We’re building the whiteboard engine from scratch ourselves, which means we have to invest a lot of effort into the basic rendering. Also, the calendar view and whiteboard view differ quite a bit in complexity You’re welcome to report any whiteboard issues in the community or email me directly at alex@fibery.io — we’ll work on fixing them or we can jump on a call and discuss the problem areas together.
Undo doesn’t work after creating a connecting arrow, and creating connecting arrows feels - to me - far too easy/prioritized. I’ll get used to the latter, but Ctrl-Z has gotta let me fix accidental stuff creation, otherwise it’s maddening. Totally interrupts “flow”, which for me is a lot of what the Whiteboard is about.