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Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

obsidian.md

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Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#431

Post by throwaway675309 »

luckman212 wrote: post #359
samstave wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ELI5 What ever happened to Evernote? because I have a thoughts been killing me in the back of my head: Need a family version but self hosted + cloud which allows for an auto push of notes, pics and calander to your own thing.. basically a family planner.

TLDR- the founder quit, a bunch of suits took over, they gutted the dev team and put the app on life support for years. Bugs piled up and nobody could fix them so they outsourced to a new offshore team who rewrote the whole thing in Electron... which of course was waaay too little, way too late.

Remember the whole copy paste debacle where they literally couldn't figure out how to allow for pasting with formatting versus pasting without formatting?

That went on for practically a year until I finally just jumped ship and ported all of my notes into markdown.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#432

Post by The5thElephant »

pbronez wrote: post #426
The5thElephant wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue is that it feels like none of these tools do anything significantly new, and are all so obsessed with wonky features like node-graph views and backlinks that are only useful to a niche audience of obsessive note-takers who in many cases seem to care more about playing with their notes than actually using or sharing them. That's why I'm working on creating https://visible.page because I want a tool that isn't…

Neat concept. What's the security story? The local-first architecture that Obsidian et al use is really valuable to me. In a world where everything lives on somebody else's server, I crave experiences that I can exercise some control over. Nothing hosted in the cloud feels private.

I totally understand and sympathize with that feeling which is not uncommon here on Hacker News, but when I speak to the average internet user they do care about privacy, they just don't have the same anxiety over cloud services. We are following a similar path to Notion or Paper who have millions of users who trust that their data is secure, private, and accessible.

Also many features like realtime live collaboration are incredibly difficult to do with a local-first setup, but provides a user experience that lets Visible pages be useful for families, friends, and communities.

We do want to make your data fully available to you via export, and we don't view or use the data in your pages for anything. We have basic event-based analytics to see how people (anonymously) use Visible, but that's just at the level of button clicks and seeing how many pages people create on average.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#433

Post by runjake »

kepano wrote: post #368
bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish the minimal theme didn't get rid of switching to the finger cursor when hovering over links.

The cursor is a pointer for links. Do you mean buttons? Also, you can change the cursor by going to Style Settings > Minimal Advanced Options

I think they mean like the macOS-native functionality where you hover over a URL and macOS changes the cursor from an arrow to a hand with the index finger pointing.

This might be the CSS? (I am not a CSS guy, sorry.)

    cursor: pointer;
https://www.w3docs.com/tools/code-editor/2404

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#434

Post by The5thElephant »

dominotw wrote: post #419
The5thElephant wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue is that it feels like none of these tools do anything significantly new, and are all so obsessed with wonky features like node-graph views and backlinks that are only useful to a niche audience of obsessive note-takers who in many cases seem to care more about playing with their notes than actually using or sharing them. That's why I'm working on creating https://visible.page because I want a tool that isn't…

> only useful to a niche audience of obsessive note-takers who in many cases seem to care more about playing with their notes than actually using or sharing them. This describes me perfectly. I use obsidian to 'feel productive' but not actually do any work.

I fall into the same trap. We want Visible to be somewhere you create pages that are genuinely useful, not just info dumps. Millions of young people now use Notion to organize their lives, but as you can see from their marketing page it is a tool catered towards business knowledge-bases and not the variety of awesome uses these people have jerry-rigged Notion into.

With just the map + calendar views alone you can address so many planning and tracking frustrations that simply aren't solved by the calendar invites and embedding Google maps into other information documents that we are limited to today.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#436

Post by coffeeling »

monkmartinez wrote: post #326
rayiner wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems more like a dark age. Obsidian makes the fans on my 4 ghz laptop go crazy. And in some ways (integration with email and tasks) it has less functionality than One Note 2010. And Obsidian has a PDF view and PDF annotations, but you can’t search in it? I’m using Org mode with emacs just so I can have cross references into PDFs and emails in my notes.

There is very little criticism of Obsidian here, but you definitely pointed a few out. I am a OneNote user and Obsidian doesn't really compare to OneNote. If you read a lot of papers, you can have OneNote OCR the text and make it searchable.

OneNote's PDF support isn't really for PDFs, though. It just literally prints the PDF as images onto a OneNote page and OCRs it. Makes for a really heavy page and none of the normal PDF amenities like doing highlighting within the file itself.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#437

Post by imiric »

vlugorilla wrote: post #231

Love the respect for privacy that Obsidian brings. No tackers and no shit. It's beautiful to find such a great app with a respect for something so important.

It's still a proprietary and closed source application, so you can't be sure what it's actually doing. You can monitor which files it accesses and the network traffic it generates, but you can only trust that they're respecting your privacy according to their policy.

It seems like a great program; it embraces open formats and is very extensible. But I don't think privacy should be a reason to use it while it's closed source.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#438

Post by PotatoRigbee89 »

I used Obsidian for about 2 years. Unfortunately I found that I only ever used it as a database to store information. I didn't often use it productively, and when I did it felt like something was off. As to not appear like a product I will not share what I use as my main program instead, but will say it is much more "press check box, and you're done." I did move everything over to Org Mode using a convenient conversion script I found on GitHub, and find using Org Mode to be much snappier than Obsidian, which is one of the key things that led me away from Obsidian.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#439

Post by wrycoder »

mikae1 wrote: post #341
itsmemattchung wrote: post #19

Love love love obsidian. The tool is aesthetically pleasing, built-in vim mode surprisingly well (a few minor glitches with the cursor blinking) — but above all else, the plug-in community takes the cake. Finally, a note taking application with a decent API that's allowed me to extract metadata and publish metrics into CloudWatch, allowing me to track key metrics and graphically[0] review historical trends of my "sec…

Did you try https://logseq.com/ ? I've had not reason to pick freemium Obsidian over open source Logseq.

Down at the end of the Demo, I was informed that I should be using a Chromium 86 based browser. Humph.
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