Can this app dethrone Notion? | Anytype First Look

early on in my personal Knowledge Management journey I explored notion it's a fantastic note-taking tool it does really well with structured types of information but that has some drawbacks it's not very good offline it does download some things but it doesn't work as well as I would think it should in offline support it's not end-to-end encrypted all my data is available on the cloud and now with notion AI I guarantee they're taking that data and they're using it to train their AI models not something I'm necessarily super fond of especially when dealing with more personal related things Here Comes though a new software in the vein of notion called any type and today we're going to look at any type and if it can maybe unseat notion in your workflow adding some benefits let's take a look on the screen I have any type's website they just launched yesterday July 19th as of the recording of this video anyway it was yesterday on product hunt with their open public beta this app has been in development since 2019 and over the course of the last few years they've made some key revisions that I think are really important to making it usable and applicable to most people these three buckets I think are very interesting when it comes to any type what's interesting about any type is that it is local first keeps all of your data local on your computer and then it uses peer-to-peer decentralized synchronization to get data from one client to the next this does have Apple apps for your mobile devices as well as the desktop which I think is going to be the killer thing to make this actually usable in most people's workflows um and so you don't have all your data sitting in a SAS service we'll get into some caveats here in just a minute uh and then they do say that it is open source which it is to some degree the licensing doesn't necessarily reflect true open source I don't believe the full product is available open source I think they have plans to do that at some point but stay tuned here I wouldn't classify this at this moment times a full open source application but it is trending in the right direction compared to a software like notion and so let's get over to the app I hit open here on my computer when you first install any type this is what you get to you run through a quick little Setup Wizard it gives you your encryption key which you should save in a password manager like one password keep that in a safe place because that's what you're going to need to be able to connect your different any type clients whether you're on multiple different computers or if you're on your mobile device uh you will see at the top here that there is this synced button though right out of the gate and that's because you're synced to a backup node if we open up the settings down here under file storage you can store up to one gigabyte of your files on the backup node that's encrypted that any type hosts so I think this is an easy way for people to basically get onboarded with any type easily you don't have to figure out syncing between peer-to-peer devices there's a centralized place where information is stored and synced from it's always nice to have that to an off-site backup in case you know you have a disaster that happens at home and all your devices are there then all your information is gone and so having that off-site node really helps with um really onboarding a little bit more quickly and making things a little bit smoother for most people but if you want to get nerdy with it if you don't want to use the backup node you definitely don't have to and if you go beyond that one gigabyte limit your files will be stored only locally now one other thing I like to do and just about every one of these first looks is go through the settings since we're here already you can set up your profile you can delete your account I'm not going to go into recovery for phrase or pin code because that will reveal sensitive data but you can get your recovery phrase there under preferences um it's pretty simple preferences here actually your default object type is a note you can see that there are a few different object types bookmarks humans notes page project task these are defaults that come out of the gate here with the setup that I have I believe these are customizable by looking at them we'll take a look into that for a future video you can have spell check enabled which is currently disabled I'm going to set it to English United States appearance light dark system you can automatically show and hide the sidebar if you want to as well you can import from notion from markdown files from HTML txt and protobuf which is the file format that any type uses under the surface it's an MIT open source license that you can access it's available there are some limitations with using markdown to be able to store files so that's why they use the protobuf file type but that being said it's still very portable you can get your data in and out you can export to markdown or to a Proto buff file type as well taking a look at the dashboard here this is your starting page which is really nice and handy most people create some kind of dashboard you can create one yourself and it's automatically a part of your any type experience so you can see in this uh automatically generated one that you have projects and tasks down here so you can see the projects that you have on your plate you can see the tasks that you have set down here you can set an area down here for some helpful materials you want to get started with so on and so forth this could be a team situation this could be an individual situation whatever it is that you want to do the sidebar over here is collapsible just like in notion you can hide it and hover over to the side and get it I like to have it pinned over here and there are a few different widgets that you can have as well such as favorites this is where like you can Star Pages in notion and have them listed in your favorites for quick access you can have a task tracker you can have your notes that are filtered by all the notes or last week or today sets are what any type calls database views basically if you're familiar with databases inside of notion that is what a set is and they function relatively the same recent notes Library shows you all of the types of files inside of or the types of objects inside of any type and then relations as well there's lots of different relations that you can use there are quote unquote here reusable links with meaning there is a lot to dive into with any type that we're not going to get into in this video but as we push into it a little bit further I think there would be some interesting things to explore in using any type down at the bottom here you can see that any type has a floating navigation bar you can see that you can add a new object set by default in your settings to be note or whatever you choose it to be there's search you can get to your settings and your profile here you can go back forward there's also a graph view I have to explore a little bit more about flow but generally if you want to see how your objects are connected to one another tasks projects so on and so forth use the graph that's the best way to get going you can have your settings here you can change some appearance items you can search right in the graph as well let's take a look at sets because I think this is one of the interesting things that comes out of um any type or comes out of notion rather into any type so I'm going to go into task tracker so this is a set you can have lots of different views in here just like you can with um with notion you can have kanban boards you can sort by priority you can view all sorts of different relations in here and different fields inside here you can change the view you can view it as a gallery grid list kanban I mean it's honestly basically a rip-off right of notion databases you can check things off right inside of the item if we open this up it looks like a notion database item pretty straightforward if we go back to my projects and click here you can see also that I can build it out just like a page too so it's an embedded set with inside of a set very very handy now I'm going to go back into nodes and we can see I've created this test page note you can change the type to bookmark human page note project task or anything in the library over here which is neat you can open the set of note you can open the type I am just going to start writing on here so just like in notion you can use slash commands you can also add blocks by hovering you can drag and move them around I'm going to use the slash command to look through here all sorts of different text items headings titles call outs list items toggles media files you can upload a ton of different files and here code Snippets late tag different dividers tables inline Collections and sets you can link to different objects inside of any type inside of your your space you can create create new objects there and then you can add new relations so really it seems like you can do so much much of what you would want to do in notion inside of any type you can do database views you can do nested Pages you can do wikis you can do lots of different structures of your information you have a graph view which is really handy it seems like any type is really a mesh between a graph oriented personal knowledge management software and a structured Wiki style personal knowledge management software this is a really deep app I think I'm going to spend some more time with and so if you want to see more of it here on the channel do let me know in the comments below but what do you think with any types local first end-to-end encrypted approach is that something that's convincing you to potentially explore or switch over from notion I love to hear from you about that as well that's it for today's video thanks so much for watching my name is Justin here with effective until the next time stay effective

Channel: Effective

Views: 51,501

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Id: xOGjnjL1SLU

Length: 11min 2sec (662 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023