First impressions after 4 days of use

General Discussion Feedback & First Impressions
1

Hi everybody and Anytype team

Context

I’m a photographer running an advertising studio so using lots of tools for the creative / administration / communication /tasks-management aspects of my business in addition of the classic PKM uses for my everyday life. Today my workflow revolves primarily around Craft, Notion and Apple notes. Used Evernote and Bear for years before.

Why change

Notion is a productivity beast but so slow and clunky that I’m always reluctant to open it, some server outage in the middle of work freaked me out as well. In other hand I really enjoy to use Craft but the lack of tags/databse makes it not suitable for tasks management and PKM.

I stated that my dream app would need clean UI/UX like Craft, advanced database/sorting/tags options like Notion, privacy concerned like Bear when I stumbled upon Anytype after trying all the alternatives you can imagine (Obsidian, Tana, Capacities, …).

First impressions

Genuinely impressed by the app, ticks so many boxes I love such as:

  • Decentralized approach and the whole objetcs paradigm.
  • Feels like the perfect mix of my 2 actual most used apps (Notion and Craft)
  • Offline first, so snappy compared to Notion (online only apps like Tana or Capacities are dealbreaker for me)
  • The attention to privacy and overall manifesto

What I’m missing

  • No possibility to share a page as weblink. (This Notion/Craft/ feature deeply changed my way of working and communicating with clients without the need to go through export and pdfs)
  • Custom icons. Emojis are making everything ugly and childish IMHO
  • Backlinks. Necessary to quickly spot if a note is linked or not to another and to navigate between
  • A way to spot notes that are “lost” in the system, not linked to anything or without relations.
  • Toggle for title and headings.
  • Better iOS app (drawing with pen, scanning, etc.)
  • Notifications (for due dates for exemple)
  • About the left bar: Still difficult to adapt to a non hierachical approach, I like the non folders paradigm (reason I like Bear and their tag/subtag system) but I’m missing another kind of organization between favorites and sets. Something maybe like Notion but more virtual (without objects being actually embedded in other objects), maybe more in Bear fashion ?

The cons

  • Very slow syncing
  • Can’t delete files ? (images, pdfs, videos,.)the Notion importer made huge mess and impossible to remove files after.
  • I’m little bit worried about the pace of development and the future of Anytype, the app seems to be under work since a while and lots of people lost patience and ranted about it online.

Conclusion

Glad to be on board as Alpha tester, and overrall very excited by Anytype. I’ll continue to test the app in the upcoming days and see how it fits in my everyday life.

To switch completely my pro workflow I would need some more time, some missing features stated above and more confidence that Anytype will not be abandoned in this crowded and fast moving market.

That said I can’t wait to the public beta to be released and see what’s next.

All the best

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2

Thanks very much for your thoughtful feedback @Elias

Almost all of this will be resolved or at least drastically improved with our Beta release. Plus a bunch of optimizations and new features which will make Anytype even more flexible and intuitive to work with.

If you haven’t already, take a look at the rundown on our Anysync infra.

Not sure this is a fully impartial take: we’re in somewhat uncharted waters here, and indeed weathered quite a few storms along the way that have required us to remap our course. The journey has been long and winding, but all that extra time spent on development was worth every bit, and has produced a giant of an app we’re truly proud of.

Undoubtedly, we still have plenty of ocean to traverse before we reach the shores of liberty, but we’ll get there, and we’re immensely grateful to be arriving together with the huge help of this vigilant Community, who imagine with us of a new type of eco-system for society, one worth waiting for. :ocean: :globe_with_meridians:

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3

Hello Elias and welcome! I think a lot of your feedback as @Angelo mentioned is going to be added to Anytype soon but I wanted to address some other as they are present already in the Anytype:

I think by custom icons you mean some 1st party ones like what Notion has introduced a couple of months ago, right? Because you can add your custom icons right now.

this feature is present already, you just have to press the “open graph” icon at the top next to navigation buttons and then click on the “Flow” tab.

These kind of notes are showed as orphans in the graph view.

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4

Hi Daniel, thanks for taking time welcoming me and for the extra informations. Regarding your insights:

Yes I was meaning first party one, they are more versatile when changing app theme.I already customised my workspace with uploads

I was more thinking the way Notion displays backlinks on the document without the need of extra click.

Yes I should do that, I’m not that familiar with graph views and I tend to forget about it.
Otherwise the whole Anytype paradigm fits so naturally with my brain, its a delight to use,

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5

But sounds like a genuine one, thanks for your feedback and the hard work.
Can’t wait for the beta

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I agree, it would be more convenient and faster.

I’m glad you’re enjoying your experience. Feel free to check out the community as people post their setups. It’s a good way to get inspired and up to speed with all the Anytype’s capabilities.

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