TLDR: Simple Tables, Kanban, Webclipper, Decluttering, Use Case Library
Hey everyone, happy Friday!
Since the beginning of this project, everyone has contributed so much to our product and growth by continuing to submit feature requests and bug reports. While weâd love to address every single one, what we work on in any given time period can only address a select portion of these.
Our goal is to provide greater visibility and clarity on which new features are confirmed for the near term (perhaps being worked on across multiple 2-week sprints), and why theyâve been chosen. You can expect such an update every ~6 weeks, and weâd really love any feedback on the format or questions on why weâve chosen certain prios over others.
Without further ado, hereâs whatâs on the menu for the next few weeks:
Major Feature Requests:
Simple tables on Desktop: Our top feature request, plain & simple. (Very) soon youâll be able to use simple tables directly within the editor as a block. This is a separate project from Sets 2.0, which is currently in R&D as we explore how to upgrade the Sets experience.
Kanban set view: Woohoo! Weâre just as excited for this as you are.
Bookmark Sets: Organize, view, and manage all of your external links using Bookmark sets.
Navigation:
Collections: We look forward to introducing Collections as a new way to group and locate your Objects. This is one way in which weâre seeking to ease friction in navigation and account setup.
Onboarding:
In-app Education: We are releasing a series of tutorial videos and reworking our âGet startedâ page for new users. These videos will be hosted externally so anyone can access them and get inspiration from demo videos.
Use Case Library: The number of pre-installed Types and Templates creates confusion and clutter. Weâre working on introducing a âUse Case Libraryâ in the product, with templates for Objects and Sets that users can choose to install if and when they find them relevant.
Again, we welcome your feedback and questions, and look forward to keeping the conversation flowing.
Awesome! Iâm really looking foward to most of it, specially Kanban and Collections. As a student myself, Iâm excited to see the tutorials to.
Iâve been using anytype for a year now and as a way to celebrate that I wanted to create a post here telling how I use anytype for studying and other stuff, writing about the good and not-so good maybe, anyone thinks thereâs anything that I must cover?
Btw, Iâm thinking of doing it by the end of my semester (around two weeks).
Hi @Charlotte, this is great! Very happy to see what we can expect in the near future . Could you shed some light on the difference between Sets and Collections? Or will that be shared at a later moment?
Pre-installed Object Types and Templates
You might have already spotted the topic, but please check-out this topic for my input regarding the built-in Object Types and Templates. I hope others share their ideas about this as well, a
Super happy to see an update on the features that are being worked on!!!
Not so happy that there is no standardized road-map format that these news are published in. This thread didnât even receive the âroad-mapâ-tag for some reason. So the communication stays a little confusing.
People who are interested have to invest time and search.
In my opinion this is some of the most sought information so why not treat it accordingly? E.g. with a stickied road-map-megathread that receives regular updates instead of multiple threads with different naming schemes?
(a public kanban board that shows the actual progress on each feature is obviously still the dream but I know, thatâs not coming anytime soon)
Thank you @floseq thatâs really encouraging! Personally (from product perspective) I would indeed be curious to see how you manage your anytype/use it for studies, and what major challenges youâve come across in the process.
Would also love to know what other knowledge mgmt/productivity tools you use in addition to anytype, in order to get a better understanding of what underlying needs we might not be addressing. Looking forward to seeing it and thanks for the support!
Re: pre-installed types/templates, Iâll respond directly in thread there to the specific types. What we keep/get rid of has been an area of hot debate for a while now, and weâre looking forward to decluttering. The main theme underlying this discussion was that in order to stay aligned with our product principles of maximum flexibility and personalisation, we should be as minimal as possible in what we pre-install. One of my biggest takeaways from speaking with alpha testers has been that many people would prefer to use custom types and templates, even when the same types and templates come pre-installed. The question will be whether providing a minimal types library will compromise discovery for the newly onboarded, but we are hoping that the Use Case library can address this concern in a different way.
@ignatovv is the owner of Collections so he would be more equipped to speak on the specifics of this feature, but from what I understand they will be different from Sets in that they behave less like a Type-level filter, and more like a âHomeâ for individual Objects (of various Types), so one can more easily choose what Objects go in and out of the Collection.
Thanks @zwometer for your feedback and please forgive my relative newness with the forums (even as I type this reply, the Discourse bot is telling me I should have consolidated all my replies ).
Iâve just moved this post to the âRoadmapâ category and will make sure to post there in the future, which I hope makes it easier to track future developments. If there are ways I can make the format of these âOverviewâ posts more useful, please do let me know so I can adjust for next time.
@Angelo, our Community Manager, will come with more news on the public-facing kanban.
Uniform naming scheme:
This thread is called âWhat weâre working on in Q3H1â so it would be nice if the next one would be called âWhat weâre working on in Q3H2â and not âDevelopment update Augustâ22â or something completely different.
I donât really care, how exactly you name these updates, but there should be some kind of a consistent pattern. Pick one and stick with it (even if itâs not the one you used for this thread).
That makes it easier to find and easier to understand which one is the newest and which one came before that.
Itâs also very interesting for us users/testers to see the progression of a feature through the updates over time. So if a new feature appears in an early stage like âweâre discussing adding blue buttonsâ itâs interesting to see it appear again even if itâs not coming soon. Something like âwe decided to postpone blue buttons for now. Weâll look into it again next year.â and then at some point âblue buttons are back! Weâre thinking about adding them to the next sprintâ and finally âblue buttons are being worked on and (probably) coming next week.â
I hope, you understand, what I mean by that: weâre not only interested in the âcoming next releaseâ-kind of news, but also what is being prioritized, discussed, postponed, and so on. That just gives us the feeling of being in the same boat with you guys and not having to wait outside, pressing our noses against the window.
Opening a feature request or adding comments to an existing one feels so so lonely if it just sits there and I have no idea if it was even read by the dev team. I know that feature requests are being looked at but there is no real feedback about it. (Also a reason for the kanban board because there I could see a feature request appear in the backlog).
So even a very small note like âfeature XYZ was discussed and the team likes it, but it has to be discussed, refined, etc. first.â goes a long way for the people who hope itâll be adopted by you guys.
I think what @sambouwer brought, in my vision, is the most important topic. A lot of people comes to Anytype with a background experience from Notion, Coda and Craft. Those people have already an organization system that they want to replicate inside Anytype and all this premade stuff gets in the way because we want to start with a âblank canvasâ. The ideal scenario for me is an option for new comers to âstart with templatesâ or âbuild from scratchâ and, if somebody regrets or gets confused after trying one of those setups, it should have a âreset from startâ option to clean everything and start all over.
Indeed we see these a bit differently - simple (inline) tables is essentially a grid block within the editor, where you can freely fill it with information, not necessarily tied to any Object, Type, or Relation.
Sets logic currently works as a type-level filter for Objects. Inline sets would basically allow you to create or embed sets within another Project, Page, etc. Since weâre re-working the logic of sets generally, we are holding the inline Sets feature a bit till we are able to introduce greater Sets functionality.
So: we pulled up the decluttering of Types/Templates/Relations in our Roadmap. It will happen this quarter. Like almost everyone here, I have been pained by the pre-installed stuff. Decluttering has actually been a really interesting and loooooong discussion internally, which I would like to share on our blog later this month to give a bit of insight into why we didnât address it earlier.
Sneak preview: The interface was cluttered in view of long-term vision of collaboration aka multiplayer mode. The main motivation being, having a fairly comprehensive list of compatible types & relations given from âthe systemâ seemed preferable to having to import dozens of incompatible types added by individualsâŚwhich would lead to exponentially greater cluttering at a later stage. We have had some breakthroughs these past weeks regarding how this might be resolved, important outcome being that for the moment we seem to have our path to (at least partial) declutterization.
On the topic of decluttering of the interface, I feel that the canvas should be totally empty, no sets, no types, no relations. Where one can really start from scratch and add relations as one pleases.
Then have a seperation for collaboration/multiplayer, perhaps in a different tab. So they donât mix with your singleplayer relation.
and as a way to celebrate that I wanted to create a post here telling how I use anytype for studying and other stuff, writing about the good and not-so good maybe, anyone thinks thereâs anything that I must cover?
. Could you shed some light on the difference between Sets and Collections? Or will that be shared at a later moment?
).