My Day 1 feedback: Awesome alpha, team!
But there is one basic Notion/Airtable use case that I struggled to find and enable… a simple DB/table join, or relational lookup. Take a simple scenario where I want to create a sports team list view showing Players and Teams. Because I use Notion and Airtable I’m accustomed to having two separate tables or databases, one with players and one with teams. Then I join them with a relational field that sets up the join/lookup function. This makes it easy for me to select named objects across the tables, and also lets me create new objects through that relation when I don’t find the one I want.
So… it took me a few hours in Anytype to figure out that I needed to create a “limited relation” for the type I wanted to join, and then I was able to get that same basic “join/lookup” functionality. I would recommend making that A LOT easier for users wanting to create database scenarios.
It seemed that Anytype wanted me to put all object attributes into Relations, which works up until a point (as with Tag relations), but that doesn’t give the clean lookup/select functionality Notion users will expect. And I knew Tags wouldn’t put those values in a type or object list that I could easily manage.
Suggestion #2:
Please create a way to apply a Template (with all relations/attributes) to pre-existing objects. For example, if I created a human and had a few relations/attributes attached to that human but then created a new relation that I wanted to apply to all my humans, I have no way to do that without going into each human object and adding or featuring the relation, right? There is no way to bulk modify all my humans, is there? I don’t even need to populate the new field, I just want it exposed when I view all human objects. Any ideas?
One possible bug/issue I can raise in the bug forum…
I have some links (not relations) that I cannot delete or break… any idea why? They show up in both the Navigation and Graph Views. The relations are easy to edit/delete but not the plain hard links. Not sure how they even got there
… and I’m not referring to the “Home” links which I believe are auto-generated bc they’re recent.
One thing I love in Anytype which isn’t featured well is the ability create a true graph database with bi-directional relationships. You might want to make it easier for people to set up the unique one-way relations, preferably with a drawing or connecting tool! That would be awesome.