Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

obsidian.md

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 394 posts

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

#281

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

abraxas wrote: post #259
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…

i bought a remarkable tablet for that purpose but still failed to adopt it.

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

#282

Post by jnk345u8dfg9hjk »

nine_k wrote: post #208
reneberlin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Syncthing comes to my mind for that specific need. https://syncthing.net/

Syncing bytes is easy, many solutions exist (and syncthing / syncthing-fork is good at it). Syncing by merging changes and resolving possible conflicts is a much harder task. Theoretically git has all the right bits, including the pluggable diffing and merging. In practice, I haven't seen it seriously used in this capacity. This is to say nothing about files you only want on one node but not on another (heavy stuff l…

> In practice, I haven't seen it seriously used in this capacity.

What do you mean? What is preventing you from using git to sync your notes?

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

#283

Post by jcutrell »

You know, this actually seems like an interesting opportunity to use this locally as a superpowered CMS for my statically generated site. I’d have to figure out how to create a linkage that can be translated to my Next-based resource URLs, but at least this would give me more to work with than just my text editor to manage my markdown stuff.

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

#284

Post by vageli »

reneberlin wrote: post #127
afturner wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The local first approach is the primary reason I use Obsidian. I trust that I can _depend_ on Obsidian because of this. On the other hand, this has also caused some headaches around using it on mobile.. but so far this has been a worthwhile tradeoff. Thanks for all the hard work!

Syncthing comes to my mind for that specific need. https://syncthing.net/

I use syncthing together with wireguard to keep my vaults synced across devices.

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

#285

Post by kepano »

ljw1004 wrote: post #274
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…

What does it mean to open-source or MIT-license a "file format"? The MIT license is a license about copyrighted software, allowing people to use/modify/publish that software. But a file format isn't a piece of software. Are you open-sourcing the specification document for the file format? (people are still free to write software that reads+writes the file format even if the specification document isn't open-sourced).…

I wish I could edit my post to simply say open format for now. The MIT license currently refers to the spec and the documentation. Over time it will also include any tooling we open source (e.g. validator, linter, migration tools). The intention here is to work towards a shared format for this type of relational+spatial data, and we're hoping to collaborate with other members of the ecosystem to make something that can have interoperability and longevity.

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

#286

Post by sleight42 »

joethei wrote: post #216
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…

No, we do not use AWS. The Sync and Publish servers are running in Digital Ocean datacenters in the US. How sync encrypts the data is documented here: https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Security+and+privacy As others have already pointed out, Sync is not the only option to synchronize notes, Obsidian sync is just a convenience option. For compliance, I am guessing you mean certs like SOC 2 / ISO 27001?, or what a…

SOC2, yes.

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

#287

Post by throwaway89201 »

skilled wrote: post #167
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.

> AlternativeTo is a pretty shallow platform

I've found AlternativeTo to be the complete opposite of shallow. In most cases its pretty precise in exhaustively listing every viable software alternative, which abundant filter options. Even if the ordering is "biased" (which I haven't really encountered), the site is quite useful without having many alternatives itself.

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

#288

Post by qumpis »

I've been doing mind mapping using excalidraw, but it lacked an easy way and visual way to link cards. This Canvas solution might simplify things a bit, though I wonder how much "freeform", unconstrained doodling I will be able to do using this. At the current point using simple excalidraw diagram might still be preferable.

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

#289

Post by captaincaveman »

xiande04 wrote: post #275
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…

That's kinda the biggest selling point of Obsidian...? It's all just markdown files. Markdown is a standard format, so you can open it in many other apps as well.

Markdown is fine for formatting text, not convinced it's great for knowledge management.

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

#290

Post by Ruq »

smusamashah wrote: post #132
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…

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…

I like the hard borders.
Post reply on HN