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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

#291

Post by qumpis »

ericax wrote: post #33
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.

Canvas is less of a piece of drawing software and more of brainstorm/mindmapping/idea workbench software. Excalidraw will satisfy different use case than Canvas and you can definitely use both!

I was using Excalidraw for (maybe unconventional?) mind-mapping, and one feature that I learned to appreciate is the ability to introduce unstructured objects into the diagram (e.g. add a box grouping arbitrary links, drop an image etc). I wonder how Canvas will hold up for such use cases.

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

#292

Post by qbasic_forever »

jnk345u8dfg9hjk wrote: post #282
nine_k wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Most apps aren't built to use it, especially on mobile. Think of the use case of your grocery list--you want one tap, open the list, type type type, and done. Anything else--having to tap save, sync, write a commit message, etc... anything, is a fail in my opinion. Git is great to use behind the scenes but I don't want to see it in the UI or slow down my workflow.

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

#293

Post by xmprt »

bachmeier wrote: post #249
xmprt wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Obsidian Sync as well but to be devil's advocate, it doesn't "just work" as a lot of people claim. It's still a bit rough around the edges. For example, it doesn't sync settings or starred files immediately. I've also noticed it dropping some text if I edit the same file on multiple devices simultaneously (or even in quick succession before sync is able to catch up). I'm sure these issues and more would exist…

> I've also noticed it dropping some text if I edit the same file on multiple devices simultaneously I don't think that's the intended use case of Sync or anything they've ever said it could be used for.

When I say simultaneously I mean typing something on a file on my laptop and then putting that away and making more change on my phone a few seconds later (sometimes the gap is even longer than that). Sync is pretty slow especially since it doesn't sync in the background.

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

#294

Post by qbasic_forever »

Very cool. I was just listening to a podcast recently from one of the Heroku founders who is working on an iOS (for now) infinite canvas app too.

I'd love to hear from anyone that has used infinite canvas in their workflow and found good use cases. Does it work well for teams collaborating on projects? I worry it could just turn into a more difficult to navigate wiki that's organized in a scatterbrained way--like it only makes sense to the person who made the most stuff in it.

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

#297

Post by sneak »

kepano wrote: post #122
sneak wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't what "open sourced" means. Photoshop is proprietary software with a well documented file format anyone can read and write. So is this software. "Open source" is not branding, it means something. It's okay to make and promote and sell proprietary commercial software. That's what you are doing, be proud and clear about it. Pretending your efforts have anything to do with free software is deceptive.

You are confusing two different ideas here. The Canvas format is MIT licensed in the same way that Markdown uses a BSD-type license. That means we are giving explicit permission for anyone to use the format and build apps, scripts, plugins on top of it. Photoshop/PSD on the other hand is a closed proprietary format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_file_format

Nobody needs your permission, explicit or otherwise, to read or write files in this format. This is a nonsensical statement.

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

#298

Post by pillefitz »

captaincaveman wrote: post #289
xiande04 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Formatting and knowledge management are somewhat orthogonal concepts, aren't they? You store information in a textfile, have rendering thereof based on Markdown, and another layer to reference and index files.

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

#299

Post by pillefitz »

randomluck040 wrote: post #235
randomluck040 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, only a few people have to do it and open source a toolkit. Also I don’t really think that we’ll have that issue with markdown because it’s widespread and rather well established. This doesn’t invalidate your point, which I absolutely agree with.

Also it’s not true for the file format for canvas which is probably way harder to parse correctly.

Way harder means what? An extra 3 days of effort to the future open source Obsidian clone?

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

#300

Post by captaincaveman »

pillefitz wrote: post #298
captaincaveman wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Formatting and knowledge management are somewhat orthogonal concepts, aren't they? You store information in a textfile, have rendering thereof based on Markdown, and another layer to reference and index files.

Which is basically my point!
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