Whiteboard improvements ideas šŸ’«

Ideas & Features
21

I appreciate that and I will try. But I continue to be mystified by why the Fibery team doesnā€™t see all the issues that I find with even short-term engagement with the Whiteboard. Do other people see things like this?

As an example this morning I returned to a Whiteboard I had been using for some decision making. It has 1 Section and with the updates to those perhaps it explains what Iā€™m seeing. But now I see an all new form of wonkiness. When I try to move a Shape within a Section it suddenly jumps outside the Section! Additionally if I scale the Section I see these weird gray elements that appear to be demarcating the space between objects. I will send a video in Intercom to demonstrateā€¦

The problem is that this, for me, is a common experience with the Whiteboard. I know the team is open to feedback, bug reports, etc., and again I appreciate your invitation to send things directly. But it is quite time consuming to try to document every little annoying thing that happens when Iā€™m simply trying to get something else done. If I am the only one experiencing these things then I guess theyā€™re my problem somehow and actually not worth reporting but if I am not the only one experiencing them, that means the Fibery team should be able to experience them, and that makes the work of testing and reporting these bugs much less necessary! Or it should. Thatā€™s where I get stuck.

The Whiteboard works less well than it should, in my view, so I donā€™t use it. When I do, I very quickly see issues almost every single time. Iā€™m immediately discouraged by the sudden need to document all the stuff Iā€™m seeing so it can be fixed (as requested by the team). I feel like such user-driven reporting is good - and even the only way - for more unusual, infrequent, etc. bugs. But when a feature area seems inherently buggy, that to me seems like something the team should be internally user testing and polishing. I.e. it would be much faster for an expert internal team member to actually use Whiteboard, see the issues, and record/report or just directly fix them. At least thatā€™s how it seems to me.

I wish I could reproduce it. It happened to me a few times upon initially starting to use Whiteboard again recently. Basically I could not get both Top Align and Left Align to work together. When I set one, the other would ā€œunsetā€/go back to default (e.g. setting Left would move Top back to Middle). After a little bit of experimenting I discovered that setting it in a specific order made it work. But now I canā€™t reproduce it at all. I donā€™t know whether it has just been fixed somehow, or if I was doing things a bit differently that first time. But this kind of experience is extremely common for me with Whiteboard: funky little issues that may or may not reproduce later. Thatā€™s why I feel like the overall Whiteboard system is kind of shaky.

I guess it must be necessary or somehow otherwise advantageous for you to make your own Whiteboard engine, but I canā€™t help being frustrated by these issues and the overall lack of ā€œsmoothnessā€ and ā€œtrustā€ in its workings compared to something like Obsidianā€™s Canvas, which is much newer than Whiteboard yet somehow works much, much better in many respects. I understand itā€™s a totally different platform and tech (desktop app vs. web just to name one huge difference), but I mean this more as an example in terms of ā€œrolling your ownā€. And I have to say before I wrap-up that I really donā€™t like saying all this in a negative way, I like Fibery a lot and have great respect for you and the rest of the team! That is actually a part of why I am so disappointed and frustrated by the way that Whiteboard has been so unpolished for so, so long (or at least it has seemed that way to me).

Lastly Iā€™ll just say I mostly use Fibery in Microsoft Edge these days. Not because I necessarily love Edge, just because there is no good multi-account support yet so I have to be in a different browser (or different browser identity) to be in a different Fibery account. I may switch to the app now that it has matured a bit, but in any case I do wonder if some of what Iā€™m seeing is browser-specific. I recall for example a sidebar pop-out issue which went unfixed for a long time, then finally got resolved in a Fibery update that referenced another browser, I think. Anyway if youā€™re not testing with Edge you should be, itā€™s the 3rd most popular browser!

(I just tested this latest issue I mention above and it also happens in the app on Windows, so much for that solution)

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22

Not addressing your core complaint, but I will say that I love using different profiles in Firefox to allow me to switch between different Fibery workspaces (as a different user in each case)

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23

Yeah, I recently discovered the possibility to do that with Google Chrome too. I donā€™t like how it changes the entire behavior of the browser in certain ways, for example adding ā€œopen in X profileā€ to right-click menus, among a number of other things. It basically just complicates overall use a little bit. Iā€™ll grant itā€™s a small thing, I just had a system that worked pretty well, so I wasnā€™t in a rush to change it. But yeah I might investigate using one browser with Profiles. Thanks!

24

Thanks again for the detailed feedback! I understand how you feel about the current state of the Whiteboard. We are actively working to make it better, and recently weā€™ve been adding features that are important for team workflows. Right now, our focus is on improving the behavior of core elements and fixing canvas rendering issues and long-standing problems in the Whiteboard (such as connectors, sections, and groups). Unfortunately, it would be quite difficult for us to switch to a different engine (like tldraw, which is developed by a separate team) at this point to avoid the current issues.

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