Started playing around with Whiteboards today and while I was initially excited about the possibilities, I quickly noticed a few very obvious usability issues I’m hoping there’s solutions for.
Other than manually dragging them around, is there no way to align multiple objects on the canvas to each other? Like, selecting 3 boxes that are misaligned and then clicking one button to center align them on the same axis? I’ve never used a canvas based tool that didn’t let you do this.
Inside of the entity that’s on the canvas, can you really not click any of the visible fields to edit them? You can do this everywhere else in Fibery so it seems weird if they’re read only on whiteboards. It’s also frustrating that they’re so static that you can’t even click on them to open a related entity…really missing that little arrow button. Or is there a “view” mode that allows you to interact with things?
You can color code and resize shapes, but not entities? Why can’t entities essentially have the same visual customization options (at least colors/borders) as shapes? I had a shape that I converted into an entity and it lost all it’s formatting.
I’m trying to get things to all connect to the top, or one of the sides of a entity and it seems to ignore the point I intentionally selected and visually put the lines/arrows wherever it wants. What’s the point of having the specific connection points that you can drag a line to if it’s not going to respect the connection point you selected? Is there a trick I’m missing?
As somebody who believes that the whiteboard with native entity representation is a huge USP of Fibery, I agree with the points you raised. The White card sadly suffers from a lot of friction akin to the rest of the product just a year back.
I REALLY hope that this year the Whiteboard gets a level of similar love and refinements. I know that canvases are hard work, but using an external tool like Whimsical just breaks all the connectivity.
You raise good points. On top of that I would say:
Simplified/improved grid and guides (it’s gotten better)
Rich text in shapes
Less buggy Frame
Comments
Better multi-select
… with those items solved, a lot of the pain will have disappeared.
PS: Embedded entities are view-only, but you can configure what to display and clicking it opens it. So I’m OK with that.
[edit: believed to believes as I still do belive that! :)]
We render everything into Canvas and canvas is not editable. Technically it can be implement, but scope is huge.
Things are pretty tricky here. Shape belongs to a whiteboard, but some database card is just a visualization and it does not belong to a whiteboard. Thus it is relatively hard to remember exact color or exact connector line position for every entity. It is possible to implement in general, but it is relatively hard.
