The only thing I am missing from Obsidian is PDF annotating as Logseq has it. Basically, you open a pdf and whatever you highlight you can copy as a link and put on any page. Then, clicking the link opens the pdf back up at that spot.
Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas
131–140 of 394 posts
Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas
#132Obsidian Canvas uses a new JSON-based file format that we have open-sourced under MIT license. You can see the spec here: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-api/blob/master/canva... Just like all other files in Obsidian, canvas files are your own and local to your device. You're still linking to your own Markdown files which are just as future-proof as ever. We decided to create the .canvas format because there w…
This is great. Just testing it out with a goal to switch from OneNote to canvas.
It can borrow a few things from OneNote e.g.
- cards resize automatically with text.
- OneNote starts with a cursor, clicking anywhere on canvas and writing is a single click operation.
- There are no hard borders around cards in OneNote.
- OneNote is WYSIWYG which this canvas isn't currently.
This is not a definitive list and I know its too early to ask for new features and stuff. Good things to consider IMO.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could consider rewriting it in Flutter/Dart. My understanding is that Flutter is faster than Electron.
Dart/flutter sound good and I have heard good things. The downside is you’re rolling the dice on whether it will still exist in five years because it’s a Google project.
It’s open source, so it will likely exist in some form.
GWT still exists and had a release last year. It’s been 9 years since it fully transitioned to an open source project. I’m not sure at what point Google stopped contributing since I see old team members in the commit history.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas
#134Obsidian Team, help me out here. What are some actual use cases for canvas? Specifically, how does this enhance the user's ability to record, synthesize, and recall their ideas? I am a huge Obsidian fan, I fully understand what canvas does and how it's used. But I don't get the point. I see the team devoting lots of energy to this feature, so I assume I'm missing something.
It's another level of organization and visualization of Obsidian content, and is extensible just like Obsidian's other core features.
But the spatial dimension really opens up other opportunities. For instance, I've been using the webviews to create workspaces for the various tasks I do - code review, writing/drafting documents.
Being able to drag and drop content from various places (including webviews) into the canvas feels magic.
With a few minor usability enhancements I'd probably be ready to call this my new favorite web browser!
But generally, it's an interface for expressing relationships between pieces of Obsidian content. Absent additional plugins, these relationships are user-defined, but they could easily be generated since they're pure JSON. Sky's the limit if you ask me. I'm excited to start writing a plugin that enhances the webviews a bit.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas
#135This looks like finally an alternative to OneNote. Since every page in OneNote is like an infinite page or canvas, I use it at work to dump info freely anywhere. The tabs and folder interface helps organizing those notes. But now when my notes are increasing OneNote don't offer a lot to organize these. Its bad at linking the notes too. This looks a very good alternative with open specs. No other tool had this kind of…
But still no note taking e.g. with an Apple Pen. Would be amazing if Obsidian Mobile added that.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas
#136As evidenced by a link to AlternativeTo on their own site, this space has a lot (145+) of competition [0]. At some level, I worry about using things much more complex than a text file, because of portability and longevity. It's enough of a pain transitioning between Google and Microsoft (and back) every few years based on various jobs.
I have files from the late 1980's that I can still read, but only with Libre Office because Apple's supplied apps can't read old MacWrite files.
Some people swear by OneNote or Notion or Keep or various mind mapping software, but keeping things cross platform and simple is a challenge. I was never an Evernote person, but it sounds like that turned into a bit of a debacle. These tools work for now, but will they work 5 or 10 years from now?
Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas
#137While the feature itself was interesting, adding such a feature made alarm in my head. I don't think this is necessarily a good trend. Please Obsidian needs to be very, very cautious about adding such large features. I won't forget why I, and many others, gave up Evernote. It did too much, not too little.
Did it do too much, or was it too opinionated and bloated? Obsidian is neither!
Obsidian devs have shown repeatedly that they understand why Obsidian is successful - just look at how they released this. No canvas-specific core software changes, just a new plugin that can be disabled.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas
#138One thing that bugs me with Obsidian: I cannot create a link to a specific obsidian vault on desktop (Windows). The thing is I often take small notes and opening an Obsidian (or any other app) is usually too much work for me. Instead, I prefer to create file shortcuts on desktop to just double-click them later when I want to access the data. The thing is Obsidian vault is not represented by a recognizable file; it's…
Remember Obsidian is fine with files coming in from outside. You can just write text into its folders, using anything.
Not sure how to do this on Windows any more, but on MacOS the trick is to use a Shortcut that captures your whatever (text input, image, web page converted to Markdown, file) and writes it into the appropriate vault and optional subfolder.
Can also capture to, e.g., Downloads folder, and have a cron move it to the vault. (I do this when capturing web pages so Browser can't write outside Downloads.)
Anything that can capture to a file path, can capture to Obsidian.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas
#139Obsidian Canvas uses a new JSON-based file format that we have open-sourced under MIT license. You can see the spec here: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-api/blob/master/canva... Just like all other files in Obsidian, canvas files are your own and local to your device. You're still linking to your own Markdown files which are just as future-proof as ever. We decided to create the .canvas format because there w…
Long time user. It’s so fast and fantastic to have full control.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, that is the standard response, but multiply the waste by the number of users, the costs that you externalize by making them pay for faster hardware and more storage and bandwidth.
Is it though? You're probably running on something with plenty of spare clock cycles and extra RAM. It's not like end users are suddenly paying a real cost for extra ram usage when the next electron app comes along. A couple hundred megabytes on a terabyte or larger harddrive? Who cares.
But why do I have those? My notebook could cost $10 if 640 kiB of RAM and 1 GB of storage were enough. I am of course not expecting that everything should work on a system from 30 years ago, we really made use of more powerful systems to do things that were impossible before, but I think we could still do a lot better.