What Do You Recommend?
In addition to the five existing View Layouts (Grid, List, Gallery, Kanban, Calendar), offer a sixth View Layout called ‘Document’ (or ‘Page Flow’, ‘Onepage’, etc) that renders all listed objects in full size underneath each other (see screenshot mockup).
This way, journals, diaries, task lists or book chapters etc would be much easier to read; attaching Relations to sub-parts of objects is no problem anymore; printing a list of objects to a single PDF would be possible; and a lot more.
How Could It Be Done?
In attached screenshot mockup, Collection View 1 shows a typical example of how today, all of Anytype’s five existing View Layouts (Grid, List, Gallery, Kanban, Calendar) of a Collection or Set reduce each object’s content to just a few words.
If however a sixth ‘Document’ View Layout existed (Collection View 2) that shows all listed objects in their full length underneath each other, the user experience of reading through lists of objects would be much more natural, and much closer to what we’re often used to with diaries, logfiles, travel destinations, book reviews etc.
So the idea is basically to render Lists of Anytype objects exactly as we’re reading lists of posts here in the community forum: We don’t have to open and close each post individually, but we can scroll through all posts underneath each other in their full length here, hence with much more ease.
Image or Video
Real World Use-Cases
Besides creating a much more nature way to read diaries, logfiles, forum topics, travel destinations, book reviews etc. like topics in the forum here, and to print them as one document, this FR would also solve many of the user needs behind the transclusion FR, the FR for blocks-as-objects, deep-linking to blocks, Inline object creation and modification, and others.
This is because essentially, instead of trying to enhance the capability of blocks embedded objects (which might be hard to build), we fully leverage Anytype’s existing capability to embed Objects in List Objects (i.e. Sets and Collections) — similar to block-level objects, just at the parent level, where List objects already have the needed capabilities.
Recommended Alternatives
Reading listed objects in Sets and Collections, as well as in /Links and @mentions with a respective preview layout is already possible today, as well as >toggle content blocks.
However, all of these existing solutions cut off the vast majority of the embedded content, so that the only way of actually read (or print) a document that’s composed of many embedded child objects is to open/close, open/close, open/close and so on — or to wait for transclusion and/or blocks-as-objects to be available in Anytype.
This FR here expands on part of the functionality suggested in my FR to flip through objects from a list in the sidebar, yet addressing the underlying need in an even easier way. So I’d say this FR here is more critical (and I hope even more straightforward to implement).
Additional Context
Another interesting application of this FR here is to extend the full-length-object-preview suggested here to the available preview layouts of /Link objects. This way, a third way of nesting full-size objects inside objects could be achieved, besides collections and links (and maybe even a fourth way with @mentions inside table cells).
Personally, the readability of listed objects like journals and task lists etc in Anytype has been on my mind for quite a while now, and I wanted to dedicate as much time as possible this week to ‘solve’ it.
I believe, a full-size object preview layout would be a real breakthrough for a lot of wicked use cases, and I hope it’s indeed much more straightforward to implement than alternatives like transclusion or block objects, while offering a lot of their benefits.
