Our new metaphor for Anytype

Anytype is a personal knowledge base, a digital brain that allows you to quickly capture, describe, and connect information. You can use Anytype to create books, tasks, notes, ideas, documents, tools and organize them any way you want.

Object-oriented computing

Everything in Anytype is an object.

Our mission is to change the role of software in our lives. Anytype is built around a new metaphor, which replaces apps with objects. They are small, easy to create, share, and remix. They will help more of us build the software we want.

This week, the first version of Anytype, designed around this new metaphor, will be released to users in our alpha program. It introduces several new features:

New types of objects and the power to connect them with relations.
Layouts help you save time on repetitive tasks, customize your objects with featured relations and reusable templates.
Finally, you can now work with multiple objects using Sets, creating tables, galleries, and lists.

New Concepts

Knowledge Graph:

Objects are our universal data structure. They are designed for automation, machine learning, and personal assistants.

Your objects combine to form a unique knowledge graph. It's a universal data structure and a strong foundation for automation. We want Anytype to be a modular platform for machine learning and plan to release our first modules for the public beta.

Relations:

Relations are the connections between your objects.

We use relations to connect objects in the graph. They add context and significance to each connection.

For instance, Patrick was born in 1984, he lives in Berlin, and he just finished an essay. His favorite band is Pink Floyd, and his favorite movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Patrick connects to each of these with relations like "date of birth," "location," "last task," "band," and "movie."

Sets:

Sets are collections of objects with shared relations. Native video support is coming soon.

Bring multiple objects into one view with Sets. You can make a Set for a specific type of object, like seeing every task in one view. Inside a Set, you can sort, filter, and choose a view.

Summary

Three lines for a huge update

Types help us define objects.
Relations are the shared language for objects and help us form the connections between them.
Sets let us see and work with multiple objects.

This update has been in closed alpha testing all summer. Thank you, everyone, for joining the onboarding calls, for sharing your feedback and your creations. Because of your help, we can now deliver this upgrade to everyone in the alpha program.