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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

#251

Post by ngrilly »

misnome wrote: post #150
rcarr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preface: I am a massive Obsidian fan and use it everyday. The problem is they wanted it multi platform on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and Linux so they made it using electron. Unless they either do native versions for each platform (5 apps!) or rewrite the entire application in something quicker like Tauri it’s never going to be as fast as apple notes, and will only get worse every time you add a new plugin.

My interpretation of their word “faster” was in terms of UI design, not physical app speed. Please, we don’t need to have the electron rant every single time an app that uses it is discussed.

Your interpretation is correct: I meant "faster" (and easier) in terms of UI/UX, not app speed. I'm confident the problem I'm experiencing can be fixed only by improving the UI/UX within the current technical stack. No need for a rewrite or a port to native apps, Tauri or Flutter.

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

#253

Post by niels_bom »

localhost wrote: post #72
kepano wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obsidian is built on a modular architecture. Canvas view is a plugin so you can turn it off if you don't want to use it. Not much is changing with the core. You can still run Obsidian as a very lightweight app with most plugins disabled.

I've taken to calling Obsidian "The VS Code of Text" for this very reason. Thanks for all you do for building a fantastic tool that I use every day!

It’s in that direction, but I also think VS Code offers more and more flexible extension points.

I was reading the plug-in development documentation [0] this morning and the ways in which you can extend Obsidian feels relatively limited. I hope they’ll add more things to hook into.

0: https://marcus.se.net/obsidian-plugin-docs/user-interface

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

#255

Post by niels_bom »

evnix wrote: post #28

I really wish the UI worked like excalidraw, the interface is seamless and something Obsidian could take ideas from. the end result could have been an SVG which makes it compatible with every other software out there.

I loved Excalidraw but I love tldraw even more. beta.tldraw.com. Also uses JSON as the data format btw.

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

#256

Post by niels_bom »

danbruc wrote: post #106

Marginally related rant. Why on earth is the macOS download a 153 MiB ZIP file that expands into 363 MiB of stuff? Why does every Electron app have to come with its own copy of Electron? I miss the times when Windows came on seven 1.44 MB floppies and you did not even need all of them because they mostly contain drivers for hardware you didn't have. Actually I don't miss the time, swapping floppies was annoying. But…

Tauri seems like a low to the ground competitor to Electron. Binaries start at a couple MB. Completely cross platform. Rust.

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

#257

Post by arcturus17 »

joemi wrote: post #212
arcturus17 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also worried by this, which is precisely why I'm considering a move to Obsidian from Notion. I'm pretty much writing everything in Markdown by now, including my personal blog.

How is moving from Obsidian to Notion relevant? They're basically the same thing?

I keep losing my files with cloud-first systems. I had a trove of notes in Evernote and I don't even remember which email I used to open it, nor if they are there anymore. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't lose local-first markdown files, as I could do the same thing I do with code: keep them in git, and then have a cloud backup for good measure.

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

#258

Post by stayux »

Dear Obsidian team.

Thank you from my heart. As a designer, I have visual thinking, which requires clear representation of relationships between information objects.

No more fiddling with mind-map apps which cannot offer this level of integration with my vault.

Now I finally have focused workflow.

Thank you again.

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

#259

Post by abraxas »

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…

Not everything needs to live for decades. Sometimes the ephemeral capture is just as important in sorting out your ideas.

What doesn't work for me with these tools is that once I've gone deep I still need a tool that offers the absolute MINIMUM friction in its interface and for me nothing has conquered an A3 sheet and a box of coloured pencils.

Perhaps I should invest my time in really learning one of these tools but they never seem to be seamless enough to pose a real challenge to a pen and paper. Maybe if I had a Wacom tablet...?

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

#260

Post by jay3ss »

randomluck040 wrote: post #225
kepano wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the fact that there are so many Markdown-based editors that can read the files you create in Obsidian gives plain text format more resilience over time. Even if Obsidian were to disappear, your writing and ideas will still be accessible in the future.

Also I would argue that you can rather simply write a parser for the basic markdown syntax and convert it to e.g. HTML or plain text if necessary by getting rid of markdown specific syntax.

Or use pandoc[0] to convert a markdown file to an HTML file (and many other file types)

[0]: https://pandoc.org/

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