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Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

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Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

#161

Post by kepano »

ulnarkressty wrote: post #157

This kind of feature would obviously not be able to be implemented into a (easily readable) markdown file, so, as Obsidian is willing to go to the proprietary open format route, could someone please consider adding usable tables as a feature? Even simple stuff like multiline cells would greatly increase the usability of the tool. The current table experience even with the community plugins is... not ideal.

I don't think we need to step out of Markdown to improve table editing. It could be solved by making a WYSIWYG table editor for Live Preview.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

#162

Post by kepano »

kid64 wrote: post #120

Obsidian 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.

Check out the #showcase-canvas channel in the Obsidian Discord group https://obsidian.md/community

Use cases I have seen shared in the channel: family trees, storyboards, taxonomy, mind maps, workflow diagrams, roadmaps, research notes, project management, etc.

In my personal use of Canvas, I have been using it for planning house renovation project, developing a new baking recipe (with images of the various iterations).

It can also be used as a scratchpad alongside YouTube videos or web pages that you want to annotate.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

#163

Post by kepano »

sureglymop wrote: post #131

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.

Not quite there yet, but there is an Obsidian plugin developing similar functionality: https://github.com/MohrJonas/obsidian-ocr

Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

#164

Post by kepano »

Kunix wrote: post #81

Very nice! Happy to see this evolution coming from Obsidian, it seems like a more natural way to organize concepts and ideas. One question: It seems it could be troublesome to have to move / resize everything when adding a new card once a canvas is already quite busy. Is there something like auto-layout in the work, to handle these situations? (like to automatically re-layout cards and groups once adding a new item i…

There are several layout options you can use to easily align and rearrange cards on the canvas. We have considered a "clean up" shortcut to reorganize the whole canvas at once but haven't gotten there yet.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

#167

Post by skilled »

s1mon wrote: post #136

As 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 Offic…

If I may interject, AlternativeTo is a pretty shallow platform for finding alternatives (I do wonder if you even checked their listings), and it's also biased - run by a moderator team that can deny/approve listings as they please.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

#168

Post by erksa »

alpaca128 wrote: post #96
kepano wrote: post #34

Obsidian 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…

Markdown was never intended for data with a graph structure, so I think it's the right decision to use a different simple format instead of creating yet another bloated non-standard Markdown variant.

Yes! Compliment the standard, don't obfuscate it even more. As someone who mostly write org rather than md, but sometime have to write md in various places, it's confusing that they're not all the same.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

#169

Post by operator-name »

sleight42 wrote: post #159

I've been concerned about Obsidian sync. IIRC, data goes to AWS servers but where does it go from there? From reading the Obsidian website, they seem a tiny company. However, it is unclear where they are based and, therefore, what legal obligations they are operating under. What more, Obsidian has so far avoided the levels of compliance that allows for adoption by big businesses. I love me some Obsidian but I'm mindf…

You don't have to use obsidian sync. Workspaces are just markdown files in your prefered folder structure, with some obsidian metadata (plugins, recently opened, etc). You can back them up in the same way as any files/folders.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

#170

Post by rcarmo »

OK, this is nice. I've tried (and failed) to use Obsidian in the past because I have 8000-9000 Markdown files with frontmatter metadata and nested folders that I just can't get it to work with (they are typically called index.md in a nested folder structure, with separate sections and media assets in the same folder), but I also use Xmind extensively for my personal projects, so this has tickled my fancy.

As long as I don't end up with a single folder with hundreds of files, this seems interesting enough to check out.

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