It has been a bit quiet from my side the last few weeks… Apologies for not posting a summary of the bi-weekly sprint review meeting the last month
! Work and personal life required my full attention the last weeks, but now there is some room again for Anytype related stuff!
In the last sprint review meeting some very exciting updates were shared about the new infrastructure. This project has been cooking for a while now, and similar to the “Relations as Objects” and Decluttering projects, it has been mostly invisible, apart from some mentions across the different platforms where the Anytype team is active about the existence of this initiative. That is about to change! Read all about it in the sprint review meeting notes below
.
Please take note, these are not the release notes for the next update, but rather a list of items the teams have worked on and are working on. Release notes will be posted in the Latest News & Announcements/Release Notes category. As part of the Release Train, the next release is again planned for the end of the month.
Completed in past sprint
Middleware
So, to start with the highlight of this sprint review meeting: the middleware team has been working tirelessly on the complete rework of the Anytype infrastructure, being the core of how Anytype clients synchronize and interact with (backup) nodes. This new infrastructure adds not only improved sync performance, but also better scalability and is future proof with the implementation of the AnySync protocol . You can learn more about this new protocol in the Townhall (topic here
, recording here
).
- Migration logic to migrate from old to the new infrastructure is mostly completed
- Migration of account (locally) is completed
- Migration of Objects (locally) is completed
- Migration of files (locally) is in progress
- Migration of files (server side) is in progress
- Migration steps for alpha users to get on the new-infra-train
- Export account on old version to local zip file on local machine
- Download and install new version from Anytype website
- Import account via zip (creates new account in new infrastructure and on the local machine, imports data into new account)
- If anything goes wrong during import, you can restart it at any time
note: the new infrastructure is not yet released. The steps above indicate the steps that need to be taken once the new infrastructure is ready and released.
Desktop
- Goodbye dashboard/homepage, hello Personal Space, goodbye old sidebar, hello new sidebar with Widgets and a Tree view! Widgets will allow you to fully customize both your personal space and the new sidebar. Happy customizing
- Collections
It’s Sets with a twist: you can choose what’s inand what’s out
. Manually reorder with drag-'n-drop, remove multiple Objects from your Collection, or completely delete them from your account, it’s all up to
you!
PS: Importing a database from Notion will add the content of the Notion database into a Collection, which should make it a lot easier to find back all those Objects you’ve imported
Android
- Library development is completed!
- Find and uninstall your own / existing Types and Relations
- Find and install Types and Relations from the Marketplace
- Create new Types and Relations from scratch
and that, all on the go without missing a beat
In Progress & Next Up
Platform
There are many preparations ongoing to support the public launch. Still a lot to do, but there has been done a lot of work on cleaning up code in preparation for going open source, the necessary legal stuff (), writing documentation.
Desktop
- Migration UI (so you don’t need to write command line stuff to migrate your account from the old to the new infrastructure
)
- Self-hosting (prep work for Q2)
- Use cases: some out of the box Anytype combo’s to get you started with some often seen/requested workflows or, use cases. For example, a habit tracker, a movie database, a to do list, a reading list.
- Onboarding flow to allow users to fully self-onboard
with signup, training, and all the things you need to get started
.
- Import improvements: import from csv, html, txt.
Mobile
- Widgets (within Anytype, not the Android or iOS widgets)
- Collections
Before finishing up, I want to point out the great work the team has done in the background to publish the roadmap on GitHub. It’s again one of those things: many hours of hard work summarized in a couple of words on a website… Take a look and see if you can spot your favorite feature. Mine is (self-hosting).
Thanks for reading and catch you next time, bye!