12 // Formable UI
As the ones following along very closely might have guessed, I’ll be sending you a bit about Formable Views this week. It’s the last of three pieces making up Formable.
Formable lets you build your own software solutions, which are, just like more specific ones, made up of a UI (Views), a data store (Formable Data), and code manipulating data and communicating with external services (Formable Compute).
Formable Views
Explore your data and discover connections
The main promise of views is that it’s completely decoupled from the data store, so you can explore your data in different views, even if it wasn’t input in that way.
You could for example write your content in an outliner, and later view it in a mind map, blocks related to a date can be viewed in a calendar, and your whole graph can be viewed as a network.
Since we’re talking about formable tools, views give you many options. Customize them to fit your workflows, or even develop your own.
As written in the Formable Data issue:
Querying your data
Having all your data connected in such a way allows you to do nice visualizations and to browse from one block to another, but where it gets really powerful is Formable’s querying functionality.
The retrieval process of our information is just as important as how we get it into our computers.
Formable lets you query any sub graph of your data in view it in the most suitable way.
Want all your journal entries? No problem. Want all your journal entries where you write about your health? No problem. Last month’s meeting notes of all meetings David attended? No problem, as long as there is a path between your blocks of information.
This becomes really powerful when you view different but overlapping subgraphs in different views.
When writing your journal, mention people, events, todo items, … whatever data you want to keep, and later view that data separated from your journal in your contacts, calendar, or custom views.
That’s again a future vision. Formable currently only sports one view: The outliner / list view.
It’s basically a text editor, with every paragraph being a separate block.
Here, I’d link to more info about the list view, which is the one anyone who’s already gotten a demo has seen.
Unless you unsubscribe, you’ll hear from me next week!
–Emil