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Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

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Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#171

Post by martian42 »

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #140

After a year+ of using Roam, I discovered https://mem.ai a few months ago and haven’t gone back to Roam. Mem is invite only beta I think. Raised 5.6M from A16z. It has bidirectional linking, tagging etc. Easy workflow via “mem spotlight” - you can capture websites or highlights into mem, or paste from mem into other apps (e.g snippets) https://get.mem.ai/faq But very intrigued by obsidian. I briefly tried it before b…

Hey, could you invite me to Mem beta-testing? It looks very interesting. I'm using Roam currently, from what I know Obsidian isn't very different from Roam. lepa.sso017@gmail.com

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#172

Post by diffeomorphism »

darekkay wrote: post #74
TRcontrarian wrote: post #20

Obsidian is the closest thing I've found to the Pensive from Harry Potter. It's a data recording format good enough for me to extract thoughts from my mind, represent them with enough fidelity to reconstruct later, connect them to the concepts that they are related to in my head, and then forget the thought completely so I can move on and process it later. I was only willing to try it out because I had heard it menti…

> when the one with a Onenote license died OneNote has been free for the last few years. > port those notes in an exportable format You can export your notes in a HTML-like format. I haven't tried to convert it into a different format yet, though.

> OneNote has been free for the last few years.

Not in my experience. The online, UWP, feature-reduced version that comes with windows is gratis, but ... .

The proper desktop version requires an office license. It then is "gratis" on top of the cost you already paid for office.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#173

Post by dkislyuk »

Obsidian has really delivered in a crowded note-taking space by focusing on the fundamentals:

1. Privacy. You can roll your own syncing (or use iCloud, Dropbox, etc.), without the notes being stored on the note editors' servers, which is a huge win over Roam, Notion, Evernote, etc. After the Evernote fiasco from a few years ago (where they considered reading your notes for ML model training and got massive pushback), I value future-proof solutions that won't become a liability in 10 years if the company providing the note taking software gets desperate.

2. Markdown. Speaking of future-proofing, Markdown is as close as it gets to having interoperability with the notes. Obsidian is at its core just a Markdown file editor, which means your notes are stored as plaintext and easy to export. There is a bit of Obsidian-flavored syntax (e.g. bi-directional links [[...]]), but these are becoming standard in note-taking. Many note-taking apps claim export functionality, but at the end of the day they're not incentivized to give you your data in a format that will work with other editors.

3. Executing on features that have become indispensable for note-taking, and personal knowledge management specifically: bi-directional linking, block-embeds, query-embeds, unlinked mentions, graph view, custom CSS, note aliases, markdown diagrams (via mermaid), and a few others.

4. Offline support. If there's any kind of login or sync required to access your notes on your personal device, that's a dealbreaker for me. This seems to have been a regression lately in the latest batch of note-taking apps.

My entire personal knowledge base was in Evernote for a few years, and now happily migrated to Obsidian. The graph view is just a magical way to explore the knowledge that you've stumbled upon over the years.

The team gives away so much value in the core app for free. If you enjoy their product, consider supporting via the Catalyst plan: https://obsidian.md/pricing

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#174

Post by darekkay »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #172
darekkay wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when the one with a Onenote license died OneNote has been free for the last few years. > port those notes in an exportable format You can export your notes in a HTML-like format. I haven't tried to convert it into a different format yet, though.

> OneNote has been free for the last few years. Not in my experience. The online, UWP, feature-reduced version that comes with windows is gratis, but ... . The proper desktop version requires an office license. It then is "gratis" on top of the cost you already paid for office.

> The proper desktop version requires an office license

That's not true in my experience. I'm running a proper "OneNote 2016" version without any license or subscription. This is also stated on a Microsoft support site [0]:

> OneNote (formerly called “OneNote 2016”), the _free_ desktop app which runs on all supported versions of Microsoft Windows and which is part of Office 2019 and Microsoft 365.

Further down, it's stated:

> Download OneNote as a free standalone Windows desktop app (some features may be limited).

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-the-differ...

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#175

Post by sylens »

Raphomet wrote: post #3

I'm a note-taking power nerd who has used all the buzzy apps on Macs. Obsidian is by far the best — it's become my personal journal, my knowledge base, a quick and dirty blog, a place to keep loose notes. The development velocity of the (TWO PERSON!) team behind this app is ridiculous. They're constantly pushing updates, and seem to handle all facets of app development with aplomb. No affiliation, just a happy user!

Agreed - and I love how the way that Obsidian stores its files is very transparent. Just a folder on my local drive. I've tried Craft, Notion, Bear, etc. but always had concerns about data portability when I scaled up to thousands of notes and manual exports became impractical.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#177

Post by ftwynn »

Been using Obsidian for a few months.

The thing that's most impressive to me is that the plugin community is constantly building radical new things you can do... seemingly every week. Normally I think of plugins as offshoot nice to have things, but in Obsidian's case the community comes up with vastly different, potentially workflow altering stuff all the time... from templating systems to query languages to task management to kanbans to mind mapping to uri improvements to outliner capabilities for plain markdown lists.

And while not 100%, many of them port easily to mobile thanks to Obsidian's hybrid approach. So all that power travels with you.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#178

Post by cywick »

vcavallo wrote: post #163
eXpl0it3r wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're in luck with Working Copy, as they mention this as being the only (known) application supporting background-sync for specific directories. https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/iOS+app#Sync

Confirming: Working Copy is _itself_ amazing, and solves the syncing-obsidian-to-github-on-ios problem.

That sounds very intriguing. How does syncing work in practice, though?

Do you have to remember to manually trigger commits/syncing or can you set it to commit/sync automatically (e.g., after a short period of inactivity)?

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#179

Post by darekkay »

darekkay wrote: post #131
benhurmarcel wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OneNote has been free for the last few years. Only if you store your notes in OneDrive.

> Only if you store your notes in OneDrive. Do you have a source for that? I don't believe this is true. When creating a notebook, I can specify if I want a OneDrive-synched notebook or a local one (OneNote 2016). Such a limitation _might_ be part of the Store version of OneNote, but that's just a guess. Also a Reddit thread I found discussing this topic stated there's no such limitation in OneNote 2016.

I can't edit my post, but my guess was correct:

> [OneNote 2016/Desktop] is the only version of OneNote that supports local notebook storage on your PC’s hard drive in addition to cloud storage.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-the-differ...

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#180

Post by Isthatablackgsd »

slightwinder wrote: post #123

Obsidian is really nice, and quite powerful, especially thanks to plugins. It's also moving fast, the developers are very active. I used it for a while to move on from org-mode, but kinda lost interesst because of certain excentrics it has. One specific problem that killed it for me temporary is the lack of support for multiple vaults, to the point that there is not even a truely centralized global configuation. Ever…

I want to use Obsidian but the only thing that keep me off is the lack of encryption support. That is why I am staying with Joplin since it offers a full encryption. Obsidian does have a plugin for the encryption but only partial of it.
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