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Obsidian Bases

help.obsidian.md

231–240 of 259 posts

Re: Obsidian Bases

#231
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On iOS any app can be set to a biometric lock by long-pressing the app icon. I believe some Android flavors have this feature, but not all. However I think it can also be done on Android using the "spaces" feature.

I use a Samsung device which unforunately doesn't have the app lock feature. But it does have a "secure folder" which is more or less what you mean by "spaces", I guess. The downside of the secure folder against normal app locking is that the apps are no longer seamlessly integrated with the launcher and other apps. It's definitely more secure but is ultimately overkill for my needs.

Yeah and for me it's no option because I have all the banking apps in my secure folder and as such I have a pretty long password on it. If you could have two secure folders then yeah maybe.

And I also have a work profile as well through "Island" :)

Re: Obsidian Bases

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. You can disable it from core plugins. Obsidian has done more than anyone else for the PKM community without lock in, it’s quite disheartening to see so many complaints.

I'm disheartened too because they have done so much and I'm happy to pay my annual fee, but it seems obvious that they are headed in a direction that isn't for me.

I think the core note taking is pretty solid, what do you think they should be doing instead? I do think search can be improved, as well as keyboard centric flows and native pdf annotations. But aside from polishing, is there much missing from the app core features?

Re: Obsidian Bases

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No “hey idiot” but for what it’s worth: are you making things too complicated? It almost feels like you’re a bit distracted by all the dimensions of data you want to track. Could this all be one page with a bulleted list, each one might have sub bullets if you care to record things like who shared it and other notes? You can just Ctrl+F for “wife” when you need that sub query.

This is kinda where I get to "then why use obsidian?". Like to me the whole point is to kinda have some linking and clean notes organization, and i'm keeping it fairly simple (just some basic tags). But yeah I suspect a large part is trying to bend it into something it's not.

Yeah. All I use it for is a listing of some markdown files. I don’t use any online features. After a decade of experimenting I’ve found this very simple approach is perfect for me.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#234
post #196

This seems distinctly in opposition to what I believe makes Obsidian a great program, providing an excellent editing environment and extensibility for markdown. The more it ventures into these types of features, the more they're going to lose to applications that designed for this from day dot, like Notion and Anytype.

You can think of Bases as an editor and visualization layer for the YAML frontmatter in your Markdown files. Frontmatter is not part of the original Markdown spec, but it became a standard way to add metadata to Markdown files long before Obsidian came along. I believe it started in 2008 with the introduction of Jekyll: https://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-ha... Frontmatter is supported by almost…

You've basically just added a custom language on top of Markdown, what is your plan for importing this into another editor in the future? How will it know to interpret it as a database?

Re: Obsidian Bases

#237
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not the only one. I invested months on Obsidian before walking away and returning to OneNote. It’s advertised as a ‘second brain’ but at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer. You can’t even manually sort notes and folders. Directory Opus can do that and more. Moreover, the community plugins model is a fundamental security risk and the community plugins themselves frequently br…

> at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer For me it's a feature.

A poor one at that.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#238
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not the only one. I invested months on Obsidian before walking away and returning to OneNote. It’s advertised as a ‘second brain’ but at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer. You can’t even manually sort notes and folders. Directory Opus can do that and more. Moreover, the community plugins model is a fundamental security risk and the community plugins themselves frequently br…

Breakage is the best-case scenario. Mass data exfiltration is the bigger concern. The community plugin system is both an unacceptable security risk, and a necessary part of achieving even a baseline level of usability. Imagine the scale of theft that must already have taken place.. the targets may never even know. The fact that Obsidian falsely claims to audit this cesspool is hilarious.

It is an hilarious claim. They don’t have enough resources to implement critical features, much less waste developer time auditing every random Tom, Dick, or Harry plugin contribution.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#239
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can think of Bases as an editor and visualization layer for the YAML frontmatter in your Markdown files. Frontmatter is not part of the original Markdown spec, but it became a standard way to add metadata to Markdown files long before Obsidian came along. I believe it started in 2008 with the introduction of Jekyll: https://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-ha... Frontmatter is supported by almost…

You've basically just added a custom language on top of Markdown, what is your plan for importing this into another editor in the future? How will it know to interpret it as a database?

That's the thing. There's nothing really "custom" here. The files themselves are all still standard markdown with yaml frontmatter. The only difference is that there's now a nice, performant interface for getting an overview for all those files - something that you could fairly trivially make with a script, if you really needed to recreate it. And the file specifying what your views were is, itself, plaintext. There's no lock-in here, and the spec is open and well-documented.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#240

Obsidian just being markdown files Pepperidge farm 'members

I believe the Bases are Markdown files that contain filters for other Markdown files. So it's still all Markdown. Amazing actually.

Obsidian markdown has "frontmatter" which is yaml before the markdown file.

A .base file is a query written in yaml that aggregates frontmatter values across many .md files into a table view.

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