46 // Experimenting With New Views

It’s the weekend, so I can take some time to do play around with some less urgent things.

As I’ve written in one of the earlier issues of this newsletter, one of Formable’s core concepts is Formable views.

The vision is to get to many different views to view data in. For now I’ve focused my work on the list / outliner view though.
See Formable’s views help page.

Currently, besides the list, there is a network view. Implementing that to its current stage only took me about a day, and isn’t even insanely useful in the product, but helped me a fair bit with thinking about the app’s structure and required foundations as a whole.
Adding more of such sloppy view implementations could take me and Formable even further.

This week I looked into some open-source calendar and timeline libraries. Just like with the network view, not necessarily because they’d be the most useful ones next up, but because pulling in and playing with existing libraries could be rather straight forward.

A view I haven’t written about yet

Formable’s concept page mentions the outline, timeline, calendar, card, network, and spreadsheet view, but—even though it talks about low/no-code—doesn’t talk about a custom UI builder.
To truly fit any workflow and be truly customisable, one would have to dig into the UI more than just writing custom queries / filters.

Something like https://retool.com/ within Formable. You could also pull in parts or complete views from Formable, or replace sub-components.

This field is something I’m not focusing on for now though. There are a couple of players in the tools for thought market that make good progress in the field. This reminds me about this thing in my read later list: https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/
What’s your favourite UI builder in the tools for thought space?

Another interesting question I’m thinking about: How could Formable just be used as a data store? Kind of like on of those Google Sheets as a back-end services.

Data could then also be pulled into apps like Softr, turning a data store into a web app.

Using other services as interfaces could also be a path for going mobile with Formable.
I could imagine doing two way sync integrations with very specific apps, e.g. a task management one, like Notion does it with their “synced databases”: https://www.notion.so/integrations

More on a mobile UI for Formable next week.

–Emil