When I first read the heading operating system for life on the anytype website, my first thought was: this program could become a modern, powerful GUI-focused Emacs for everyone. Contacts. Music. Thoughts and notes. Bookmarks. Markdown editor.
I have a large music library, I read a lot and watch documentaries. It’s nice to add these things to anytype with the files itself, but it’s not a nice UX to actually use these things. It’s less of an operating system at the moment, but more a place to cross-reference a movie director to a book author to a bookmark to an Email address etc…
There are still a lot of things I look forward to: it is possible to add music. But what if I want to play an Album from an Artist I like on the go on my phone? My music is on anytype - I don’t want to have my music collection a second time on my phone just to listen to it, while the cool information is on anytype.
What about automatic adding meta data to relations like album, artist etc., when adding a song to anytype? Or what about Importing IMDb meta data about movies?
With all of these thoughts I need to ask to myself: what is it that anytype wants to achieve? And what is it that I want to do with anytype? Is anytype the right program for me? I hope it will be.
Cheers
~ Luca
I too wonder how much of this will be possible in the future. I was surprised to hear many people wanting to do things like add their whole media library (not just music but movies too!), and wondering how the large file sizes will work with IPFS, Anytype sync services (future, paid offering), remote/offline playback and local storage issues, whether there will be streaming of media, etc, etc.
One thing I am fairly confident of, at least, is that when the API/SDK becomes available, it will be very possible to pull in data from any existing sources (that provide their data programmatically, e.g. have their own API). IMDB as an example does not provide an open API, as far as I’m aware, but there are alternatives, e.g.
or http://www.omdbapi.com/
And there are probably equivalents for music, etc. You will almost certainly be able to pull in information from a wide variety of sources, including others like RSS, read-it-later services, etc. too.
I would still caution everyone not to think of Anytype as a literally all-in-one app, especially when it comes to Media. Anytype seems most clearly focused on generating original content, it is primarily an editor rather than “player”, so to speak. Plugins may change that, but I think one really has to ask themselves whether having music integrated into a PKM tool like Anytype provides any advantages over using e.g. Plex or something.