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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

#381

Post by aussiesnack »

trinsic2 wrote: post #374
aussiesnack wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's decent note-taking software with useful features and a storage medium that's currently in favour. If you have a use for such a thing, it's one of the best options available right now. But that's all. You can forget all the "second brain"/zettelkasten stuff. It's just marketing gumpf used to build careers prattling about notetaking methods (dressed up as something fancier).

I had doubts about the second brain stuff as well, but I am seeing that with the connections I make to my notes using links/backlinks tags while hanging out in the graph view allows me to see connections between notes and helps me with idea generation, so I can see why people call it a second brain. It helps you think about writing in a different way. That has been my experience though.

It's the messianic fake novelty and loathsome invented marketing terminology that I'm objecting to. You can unfussily make notes, using your own emergent organisation exactly like people have done for centuries at least. Tech can add searching and organisational niceties, and it makes sense to use them. Obsidian is good at this (I use it).

Or, alternatively, you can do exactly the same thing and get terribly zealous about it as a grift, or a way to mask the fact that your notes are all about notetaking systems and just add nothing to the sum of human (or even your own) capability.

I'm not arguing against the activity of taking notes, nor working with different representations and arrangements of them to discover what emerges, nor against note-taking software, just all the timewasting blather that goes with it. "Second brain" (probably TM'd somewhere) is by the way only a dull grey businessy echo of Andy Clark's (much more interesting) 'extended mind' theme.

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

#382

Post by alpaca128 »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #313
erksa wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed here too. This was a poor choice IMO. They call it canvas but it looks like a poor hybrid between mind mapping and UML. Markdown already supports hierarchy. I am guessing this let's you set coordinates for how to lay the canvas out but this is exactly why I'd never use it.

You say you agree but then state the opposite opinion?

> I am guessing this let's you set coordinates for how to lay the canvas out but this is exactly why I'd never use it.

You wouldn't like a text editor that automatically rearranges source code or sections of a document without you having a say in it, and for the same reason I find manual layout for this graph feature absolutely necessary. And beside that it's very likely you'd want some other metadata that just have no place in standard Markdown. Maybe a viable alternative would have been generating graphviz dot code and embedding it in Markdown code blocks, which would make it compatible with other tools as well - that could still be added via plugins.

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

#383

Post by deafpolygon »

captaincaveman wrote: post #378
deafpolygon wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Org-mode works well. It is essentially just a markup like Markdown.

it works well for laying out information for reading, and has some additional markup beyond just layout (unlike markdown), I'd argue it is fairly rudimentary and not extensible.

It's extensible in other ways.. but either way i'm moving back to Obsidian due to constantly tinkering and trying to improve my "experience" on Emacs. Obsidian gets me 90% of the way there without much fuss. It has far better image handling, and with Canvas - the possibility to lay out my own notes in various configurations is nigh endless.

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

#384

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#385

Post by mrehler »

rcarr wrote: post #203
misnome wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't just declare your interpretation of faster to be correct and then denigrate someone else's interpretation by classifying it as a rant. The comment: > it's faster and easier to create a note in Apple Notes, retrieve it (as they as are sorted from most recent by default, and also I can pin some notes), search, and navigate in folders (especially on mobile, navigating across folders is so much better with Appl…

Part of the reason on iOS it takes longer, at least in my vault set-up, to begin throwing in a new note is that Obsidian has to finish syncing and show me notifications (that I wish I could turn off) from a plug-in I value before I can begin navigating to a "new note" screen.

Not just for the speed, but also for (personal) mental simplicity, this is one of many reasons I use [Drafts](https://getdrafts.com) for so much writing. I also use a few other notes apps in concert with Obsidian, and if I just hit Drafts on my iPhone or Apple Watch I can start getting the idea down. If it's going to Obsidian, it's an action from Drafts to just dump it in there without using Obsidian's interface at all. If it's not going to Obsidian (and instead going to Bear or OmniFocus or into an email or a text message or appending to an existing note or a million other things) then it's just a different action.

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

#386

Post by mrehler »

SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #231
rcarr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dart/flutter sound good and I have heard good things. The downside is you’re rolling the dice on whether it will still exist in five years because it’s a Google project.

A lot of companies would be really upset at Google if this happened. Besides Google, who re-wrote several of their own apps with Flutter, like Pay and their Home devices (which some are apparently running fuchsia now?), there's BMW, eBay, STAIR (US Department of Veteran Affairs), Nubank, and plenty more.

> A lot of companies would be really upset at Google if this happened

There's lot of projects that Google has killed for which this is the case, though. Stadia had people building for it, and Reader had people building atop it to name maybe the two highest profile ones. Of course, the cost vs value of maintaining those for Google was a very different question, but on its own, other companies' interests don't seem to move the needle much for Google when it comes time to kill a project.

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

#388

Post by neop1x »

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…

From FOSS alternatives listed there, LogSeq [1] looks quite promissing! It also mentiones canvas feature in their docs [2] (which are written as LogSeq graph, too). I am still evaluating it but so far so good, it even has an Android app (as a pre-release on GitHub).

[1] https://logseq.com [2] https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/whiteboard

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

#389

Post by tester457 »

esjeon wrote: post #358
captaincaveman wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree. Markdown is way too much overrated as a multi purpose document format. I find it very limiting even w/ Obsidian. It would probably work well for some text-people, but anything more complicated than 1D character stream won't fit well into Markdown.

So what would you prefer?

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

#390

Post by xypage »

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.

The thing is that if you want something portable where if the app goes down you can still use it, you don't have many options. There aren't really any formats that support the kind of note linking used in PKM by default, besides maybe HTML but if you think that's a better solution than markdown I think we have a difference in values that can't really be remedied here. So assuming you're not using HTML, now you're looking for a common format that is easily parsed so that you can have links, and also simple enough that you can look at it on pretty much any PC. That really only leaves markdown and plaintext (and maybe JSON? But again, same as HTML, that technically works but it doesn't really fit the bill here), and markdown is just better for notetaking
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