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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

#71

Post by meltyness »

criddell wrote: post #59
poszlem wrote: post #25

I honestly cannot grasp how is it possible for the Obsidian team to consistently release such high quality software on a regular basis, almost for free and with such a small team. Just incredible, and if anybody from Obsidian reads that, you have my utmost respect.

I kind of wish they would plant a stake in the ground and declare it feature complete and then go into maintenance mode. It's almost inevitable that they are going to keep adding features, give up control to VCs, and then fade away like Evernote. This feature is neat, but it feels like a turning point. I believe it's the first betrayal of the it's-just-a-folder-of-markdown-files principle.

You can represent a collection of nodes like that, but human readable/machine readable flow configuration, highlighting, plus composition seems like a tall ask, and JSON is a small extension that's mostly human-readable as it is.

This is adhering to an obvious crack showing in Obsidian as it is: how do you store a graph view configuration? Right now, per vault, you get one slot unless you draw in something like Juggl, which is... well it raises serious usability concerns.

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

#72

Post by localhost »

kepano wrote: post #47
tianqi wrote: post #46

While the feature itself was interesting, adding such a feature made alarm in my head. I don't think this is necessarily a good trend. Please Obsidian needs to be very, very cautious about adding such large features. I won't forget why I, and many others, gave up Evernote. It did too much, not too little.

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!

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

#74

Post by essive »

raybb wrote: post #18

One thing that's really missing for me from Obsidian is a view similar to that of Google Keep. Like sometimes I want to drop a small note "my stuff is in locker 2130" or "Look into Open Library WikiData linking percentage" and then easily be able to see it again in a few of all notes most recent. A thread on Reddit give me a small hope this update may do that but I don't think so. PS: I'm aware of the daily notes vie…

Agreed - I have the very same issue as well. Google Keep is my goto mobile app for most of my note capture just due to its speed and ease of use. Now I have a few github utilities to download my Keep notes to markdown for Obsidian use later - but that isn't really ideal yet.

PS - all I can say about Canvas is 'wow'!!! Awesome feature!

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

#75

Post by dr_kiszonka »

rcarr wrote: post #54
ngrilly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using both Obsidian and Apple Notes, both on my iPhone and MacBook, and that's also the main thing I'm missing in Obsidian and keeps me partly on Apple Notes: 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 A…

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.

They could consider rewriting it in Flutter/Dart. My understanding is that Flutter is faster than Electron.

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

#76

Post by steveylang »

rchaud wrote: post #5
mknapper1 wrote: post #2

This looks like Obsidian's first move away from using some dialect of markdown? The .canvas files appear to be human readable json, but certainly not as readable as markdown. I'm excited to try this out, but I hope this isn't a trend towards using proprietary formats.

The linked documents are still Markdown. If I understand it correctly, the use case is to link existing MD notes visually. That's a different way of looking at the data than the two-way backlink approach that was the foundation of Obsidian (and other personal wiki tools). I'm interested in this, as I currently use a combination of Obsidian + SimpleMind, but currently SimpleMind has more features (full fledged mindmap…

I also use both, Simplemind is a fantastic mind mapping app.

For smaller scale mindmapping though, I am finding Canvas very usable already for such an early release. The ability to easily link or embed to markdown files (or create new ones) is really nice, and I like having all my work in a common area. Community created plugins will also dramatically expand the app.

There will always be advantages for the dedicated apps as well, but this is going to be a great option for many.

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

#77

Post by kepano »

criddell wrote: post #59
poszlem wrote: post #25

I honestly cannot grasp how is it possible for the Obsidian team to consistently release such high quality software on a regular basis, almost for free and with such a small team. Just incredible, and if anybody from Obsidian reads that, you have my utmost respect.

I kind of wish they would plant a stake in the ground and declare it feature complete and then go into maintenance mode. It's almost inevitable that they are going to keep adding features, give up control to VCs, and then fade away like Evernote. This feature is neat, but it feels like a turning point. I believe it's the first betrayal of the it's-just-a-folder-of-markdown-files principle.

I agree that VC basically killed Evernote. Obsidian is completely user-supported, no investors, we're explicitly avoiding the VC route.

As far as features go, we're continuing down the path of a modular architecture. The core will continue to be as streamlined as possible. Canvas is like any other plugin, you can disable it. We think that flexibility is important, because not everyone thinks the same way. You should be able to create an environment that fits your way of thinking. However not everyone needs every feature, thus the modularity/extensibility approach.

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

#78

Post by gat1 »

para_parolu wrote: post #51
raybb wrote: post #18

One thing that's really missing for me from Obsidian is a view similar to that of Google Keep. Like sometimes I want to drop a small note "my stuff is in locker 2130" or "Look into Open Library WikiData linking percentage" and then easily be able to see it again in a few of all notes most recent. A thread on Reddit give me a small hope this update may do that but I don't think so. PS: I'm aware of the daily notes vie…

I had the exact same problem. I ended up writing a small ios app. It only contains one textarea and sync text between devices. It was rejected by appstore for simplicity. But works well for me.

Seems interesting ! What did you use to sync the text between devices please ?

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

#79

Post by codalan »

tianqi wrote: post #46

While the feature itself was interesting, adding such a feature made alarm in my head. I don't think this is necessarily a good trend. Please Obsidian needs to be very, very cautious about adding such large features. I won't forget why I, and many others, gave up Evernote. It did too much, not too little.

It wasn't the feature-bloat that made me give up on EN. It was the broken sync, the difficulty getting an export of my notes from their server, the brutally sluggish mobile and desktop apps, etc.

Obsidian doesn't seem to be going down that road. Using another provider to store the notes (Dropbox, S3, Blob, self-hosted disk space, etc.) takes care of issues #1 and #2. Making this an optional plugin answer #3.

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

#80

Post by mattivc »

azeirah wrote: post #26
mmastrac wrote: post #16

I would kill for some sort of integration between Remarkable and Obsidian. Both are excellent tools and the Remarkable is great for sketching on the go. I just wish I could keep both in sync somehow.

I'm working on a sync tool specifically for ReMarkable to Obsidian. https://scrybble.ink It's still in beta for now, so it's definitely not flawless, but it does work! You can choose which files from your tree to sync, they will appear as pdf files in your vault.

Just purchased the "Early bird tier" to give it a try. I just get a "500 Server Error" when clicking the "View Content" link in gumroad.
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