I’m glad to see the discussion of Fibery and that you guys have given it a look! @MichaelDubakov greetings, welcome to this forum!
@William_Porter. I don’t contribute much to the forum aside from chatter, unlike most of you Power Makers in here. But perhaps I’ll let myself take credit for the heads-up on Fibery. I can tell you that I found Fibery when I found @MichaelDubakov’s article about Notion/Zenkit/AirTable/Coda here. I agree with just about all of it, in particular my difficulties in Making with Coda. Having just mentioned that again, I feel like I should point out that I’ve been thinking, as I get more involved here in the community, that I don’t there are many non-technical participants like myself in here! So the article may not speak to many of you guys!
Michael and team, I believe, are trying to solve some of the challenges in making that both Notion and Coda pose, and I believe they have done that in the beta. In particular, I am after the simplest way to build relationships across my tool. Which is one of the reasons I concur with those of us interested in Coda adopting a lot of what’s present in RoamResearch.com. None of Airtable/Notion/Zenkit/Coda offer an easy way to set up reciprocal relations. Lookups are not easy for the average user to build.
Case in Point: An example that some of you may be able to solve for me? I’ve been chatting with Coda support for two days on it with no solution. This is a typical type of thing that trips up my building in Coda:
I am trying to follow these instructions to quickly add a lookup into a referenced table, which I intend to use to add new items into the source table:
At the end of the article, there is discussion of the newer feature that suggests which column already is looking up a table, and you can add that reference in a few clicks guided by the “blue dot.”
I have two simple tables in this doc that are using lookups that way:
- I created a lookup first from Source of Lookup to Destination of Lookup
- Then in Destination of Lookup I formatted the column Relation from Source of Lookup with the suggested “blue dot” lookup to Source of Lookup.
My expectation is that in the Destination of Lookup table, I will be able to add in a new row in the “Relation from Source of Lookup” column to the table “Source of Lookup”. But this is blocked by the formula. So when I use this feature, I wind up not getting a true “two-way” functionality.
There is a post in the community by @BenDavis suggesting this is a quick solution to getting a reciprocal reference in the destination table:
But in the end, since I can’t add into the destination table, this doesn’t really do the trick.
When I say “easy,” I’m talking about something where, like in Confluence, you make a reference to an item, and the referenced item gets that automatically. Easy. This app we are talking in, Discourse, does a great job, too. Fibery does this extremely simply, and that is a big plus for me in using it.
I also have a lot of faith in Michael and his team, as they created TargetProcess. I’m curious how many of you are familiar with it. I have spent a lot of time in TargetProcess, and it is extremely well thought-out for managing larger dev process. They also have in fact one of the few mind map/live diagram implementations, a big topic around here, that I’ve even seen in such an app:
https://www.targetprocess.com/guide/reports/predefined-reports/relations-network-diagram/
I have been using Fibery since November, and I believe has solved a lot of the issues Coda users such as myself will have trouble with. Again, I’m not so sure how many Coda users of my skills are actually in this community! You all are so technically adept, perhaps you don’t need things simplified and are creating your own “Fibery’s” for your teams with Coda as the platform!
And @Bill_French and @Johg_Ananda, I too thought the spoof site was a hoot. I know Michael got some good coverage of it on HackerNews and elsewhere. But joking aside, I like their approach. And, like Roam, I feel it’s an interesting alternative for some less-elite types out there who find Coda overly challenging, until Coda builds out more tools for the “less-advanced.”
Cheers guys!