Hey, everybody! My name is Vasily, I’m a new member of Anytype team. We’ve recently started a research about API implementation for Anytype. The feature that you all and we have been wanting for a long time!
Because of our p2p and e2ee architecture, as you can imagine, the API in Anytype is not just a matter of coding a couple of REST-endpoints on a “server”. Things are going to be a little trickier in our lives
To better understand what we should focus on first and not make an “abstract API” that nobody can use, we want to collect some use-cases from you.
Please tell us what you could use the API in Anytype for?
What bots, integrations, background services would you like to see first or code yourself? Maybe you’ve had an idea in your head for a useful integration for a long time, share it too!
Rules:
1 comment = 1 use-case. You can write several comments but please don’t put them all in one, so that voting is cleaner.
Vote for other use-cases! So we’ll see which ones are more in demand.
Feel free to discuss details, ideas and technical implementation in replies.
No off-topic please.
Template:
Use the template for better readability. We’re going to refer to this thread a lot, so it would be nice to have it clean and organized.
**Short description of your use-case or idea**
More details about what you're trying to accomplish, how API integration would help you, what you've tried so far...
Here is a link to Github Discussion around the same topic. Feel free to choose one:
Here’s another: integration with external databases for media tracking. The Anytype gallery suggests a “movie database”, but the same concept also applies to book tracking, music, etc: ideally I’d just type in the title and all of the metadata (director, language, duration, etc.) would be imported.
A bookmarking chromium extension that have Text Snippets Web-Clipper ability
I’d like to see a background services like Raindrop.io which would allow us to :
Add and manage our bookmarks from/to Anytype in an nested folder structure.
Save highlighted texts snippets from webpage and adding tags to them (without automatically adding the webpage content as I want to choose what to save myself)
And the ability to add manual notes/blocks of text alongside the highlights and URL.
One of the use cases would be to use Anytype with Raycast. It would be awesome to control anytype with it whether it’s creating objects, checking off tasks, see the events, search, etc.
The other thing that come’s to my mind is integrating my movie/tv show database with TMDB. It would save time if I populate certain parts of my objects and relations with the metadata of that specific movie or actor.
I’d like to be able to automatically create objects from accepted calendar events and pull in all the relevant information. It would make taking notes much quicker, instead of manually creating an object for each meeting already in my calendar.
When I add a book on my GoodRead profile, or a movie on my Letterboxd/Imdb/Trakt, sync my diary with an associated object in my Anytype space. So that I can have a unified place where I have my whole cultural life for posterity, and sharing my thoughts without publishing them with a central server but still have the benefits of theses social platforms.
Note : most of the these platforms have an RSS feed of each profile. If Anytype have a “RSS feed element to Anytype Object” feature, that could work for multiple platforms at once.
integration with Snipd podcast app so that I can import my notes and snips from there over to Anytype.
Integration with popular calendars, namely Google so that I can view my task, events and calendars all from one place. What Notion managed to achieve with integrating Cron is just bananas .
Sync with the calendar could be incredibly useful, even if it only works one way. I imagine creating an event on Google Calendar and having that trigger the creation of an Event-type object in Anytype. Naturally the the metadata (title, date, time, participants, location) becomes Relations.
Having the automatically-generated event-object can make taking notes/writing a summary/marking to-do tasks so much smoother. This can easily become something I’d use every day.
(On a side note: I’m trying to avoid feeding the Google behemoth, and actually pay Proton to replace many of their services. I’m willing to guess that’s true for a few others here too. Sadly, I don’t see Anytype integrating with Proton Calendar.)
I might be completely off regarding the scope of things that can be managed thru an API and plugins, but here are two more thoughts:
Thinking of Anytype as a notes/PKM software: flashcards with spaced repetition. This only becomes relevant for integration via API (like in Obsidian) if there is no plan to have this as a native feature (like in SiYuan) in the coming 2-3 years.
Obeying the rules, here’s the second thought in a second comment:
(I was prevented from writing a second use-case in a separate post because the forum doesn’t allow consecutive posts. It’s an annoying conflict with the rules.)
Thinking of Anytype as a proto-productivity software: I’d love to figure out an AI service to tag my photo library. With “file as object” and the ability to add relation tags, the groundwork is already there (though the UX is very lacking). The libraries for open source facial recognition are also already out there, ready to be plugged in and tied together with file-as-object.
Over the years I’ve collected tens of thousands of images. I like to imagine importing this whole collection into Anytype, and be able to link any picture with somebody I know with their respective Human-type object. Then it’s also incredibly easy to search for an image with a particular combination of people, or certain Humans in a given location/time, etc.
I imagine having an inline set for every Human-type object, filtering for all pictures where they are tagged. Looking for a picture of both Harry and William together? Super easy, as are other searches that can base on automatically-generated tags. Sure, there’s work to be done as file-as-object UI, but this is one way this area can be supercharged without too much work on Anytype’s end, just allowing access to a tagging algorithm
A “playlist player” (that plays all embedded videos in a Set’s View)
I have many looong playlist in my account on YouTube. But they aren’t comfortable to maintain and use.
Meanwhile I prefer it to create in Anytype an Object for each good song, that contains a YT Embed plus some additional information (Tags etc.).
The problem: for playing some songs I need to open the Objects one after the other and click on the play button in the Embed.
I would like to have a way to play all songs from a Set’s or Collection’s View automatically one after the other - same way as a YT playlist does.
I wouldn’t dare to beg the devs to implement such a non important feature, but I hope the coming API will make such functions possible.
Quickly add pages or notes
I want to use the API to quickly add pages or notes, as I have some notes on other platforms that I want to be able to migrate, and it’s important to be able to customize the creation date
.