I didn’t heavily try Superlist, just a few minutes or so, but from what I can tell, the left-most pane acts as a ‘home page’ that returns you all the way to the beginning of the list of tasks—because the tasks are nested.
On Anytype, there is no real ‘home’ because of the object-based system. There are links in one direction and backlinks in the other. This is what the flow view attempts to show. Nonetheless, we appreciate sharing the inspiration. We will take a further look but the underlying systems are different.
@kaye in Superlist’s case you’re absolutely right. But I think the navigation model should be decoupled from the data model of the app which utilizes it. Taking as an example Obsidian Sliding Panes or the Andy Matuschak site, it works just as well with non-hierarchical interlinked pages-- these are no different from Anytype. I only reference Superlist as an example of the same navigation model but much more polished than the other two.
To help the case, it raises the question of “why” would you want to see your opened link side by side with the former page. The answer:
Faster navigation.
When I’m perusing interlinked pages, sometimes I’ll try a route that wasn’t the destination I was looking for, and then need to go back to try some other route.
When I’m using a table or list view (which will become increasingly common with Collections 2.0 if users no longer build their own indexes, but just use this as a tagging system), at times I’m trying to quickly go in and out of records to make changes, which is facilitated by not needing to click back and then into a new record.
Visibility
Other feature requests have asked for a native side-by-side view with two different tabs. The reason: being able to see and edit two pages with similar content at once is beneficial. It’s harder to go back and forth and lose the context each time.
Indeed, these are areas that can all be improved. I’d make the point as these two things being different though. One is the navigation between linked objects. Two is the side-by-side view for parallel consumption and editing.
I’d add that Superlists’ sliding panes was not actually ‘clickable’. And one other issue I see with it is the performance impact it may have when loading really large objects. A collection/type/query is also an object after all, while in Superlist (and other apps), they seem a little more simple.
Agreed, they are two different things. There’s a way they could work in parallel in the same app, but not at the same time without being confusing.
Agreed with the performance concern as well-- it would need to be creatively engineered. Perhaps fully mounting active panes, partially mount several previous, and inactive then frozen until active again (rehydrate at that time).
What did you mean about the “clickable” portion? I didn’t quite get that.
I attached an HTML mockup. Ignore data quality and styling. Main things I wanted to showcase:
How sliding panes could appear for a more database-oriented app in a desktop view.
How to navigate back to root or trace path through the app (interact with my stacked breadcrumbs at the top).
How it would look with recursive or rootless links.
How it would work with inline links.
In long pages, if you scroll out of view of the selected item, how it could signal where the open item is in the scroll view (margin line converts to directional arrow in a matching style).
I see I can’t attach html here-- is there someplace I could sent this to Kaye, or a way to upload for others to preview here without hosting someplace else?
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the community meeting. Could you please let me know if this topic was discussed? Is it on the roadmap? I really miss having this feature.
It’s very difficult to answer such a question, in a way yes and no. You can check out the Town Hall video and announcement. It’s quite a doozy— Anytwo and the future of Anytype