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Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

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Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#481

Post by chucky123 »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #107
mirages wrote: post #25

Is it me or am I the only one who took a good 3 mins to figure what this app is for ? Sorry I don't want to sound disrespectul but I didn't found an quick and easy parsable description. If I would show this my parents, I wouldn't be sure if they could guess. :/ "Obsidian is a powerful and extensible knowledge base" ?????

The reason for this is these "second brain" and "personal knowledge management" apps are rather cultish and aren't really intended for an audience outside of those already in the know - that is, the circuit of cycling through all these different apps and "productivity" games. A similar app, Roam Research, is the same story as Obsidian, only a few chapters ahead. Roam's marketing campaign actually referred to itself a…

Agree, I've also seen this is a rising sentiment on Twitter these days.

These tools are technologically great, but they are not 10x better than notepad.exe

The marketing and hype around these tools are self perpetuating. Some twitter guru will post about these tools and get kickback or an increase in followers. People who pay for tools post about their experience online so they can signal to other people who have paid for this tool that yes, they now belong to the cool kids club too.

And there are content creators who's income depends on these tools. They will 'review' these tools, post a review online and unknown to most people, they will be getting some money for this review under the table.

I've also seen that this is all mostly limited to tech folks who consume too much of their info from Twitter and Youtube. None of my offline friends know about Obsidian, Roam, or the zillion productivity tools that are being produced.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#482

Post by quickthrower2 »

FirstLvR wrote: post #363
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.

One note 2010 is the holy grail for me, nothing can beat that simplicity. Tho … the purple color stil bothers me The fact runs super fast on any computer makes me wonder why did they downgrade into the current version which is absolute crap

For personal notes I use Google docs. I want the experience to be a bit average so it becomes about the notes not the tool. I tried notion and most of my brain was going into notion. Once I had to upgrade to do something basic I left: I am jot against paying but I don’t think it is good enough a UX to pay for.

With Google docs 99% BPU (Brain Processing Unit) goes into writing the thing or searching or reading the thing. As it should be.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#483

Post by sweetsocks21 »

Is there a note taking app/knowledge database that auto-magically tags + adds metadata to everything and is searchable?

I've tried many different tools in the past and I find I can't stay organized. I don't want to sit there linking stuff together, I just want to jot down a quick note or thought and have it link up with enough stuff that I can find it easily later.

I was thinking of making a personal tool based on some kind of database like datalog. Where I can dump a bunch of facts and have the computer automatically tag and link items.

I'd love something that knows I'm currently in a meeting with X,Y,Z persons while I took a note and automatically links it with them and any keywords etc from my note to other notes and topics.

I saw a demo for outreach? I think that did some cool stuff for sales, listening to phone calls and making notes linking people etc. I want that but for _everything_ haha. Have it link in with JIRA, slack, GitHub, Gmail etc. One stop shop.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#484

Post by arcbyte »

cldwalker wrote: post #399
MikeTheGreat wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried both and am using Obsidian now. I wanted to use logseq (I felt good about "Obsidian, but open source") but when I tried to find some text in a page I was writing it didn't work. I'm a total logseq noob but as far as I could tell I needed to install an extension/plugin to search through the page, which was weird. Plus, the plugin didn't work for me (I typed in the thing to search for, clicked "go find it" and…

Cmd-K to find any line in your notes and Cmd-shift-K to find any line in your page. Starting with 0.8.3 there is also a native find-in-page feature, https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/Find%20in%20page , which can search anything that is visible including results of queries

Its already lost me with nonsense keybindings and I haven't even installed it.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#485

Post by NhanH »

sweetsocks21 wrote: post #483

Is there a note taking app/knowledge database that auto-magically tags + adds metadata to everything and is searchable? I've tried many different tools in the past and I find I can't stay organized. I don't want to sit there linking stuff together, I just want to jot down a quick note or thought and have it link up with enough stuff that I can find it easily later. I was thinking of making a personal tool based on so…

The problem with automatically tagging/ linking is that everyone has a different categorization system (for good reasons). A note that only needs to be tagged “meeting” for one person might need to be tagged as “casual one on one meeting” for another —- just imagine the difference in granularity for IC vs management.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#487

Post by bccdee »

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 was pretty invested in the "tools for thought" space for a little while, but my interest cooled as I realized that I was using zettelkasten tools like Logseq to try and recreate simple folders of documents, because as it turns out that's all I really needed to begin with. I use Obsidian, because wiki links can be handy from time to time, but my notes these days are mostly just plain markdown sorted into folders by topic, and that's plenty for me.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#488

Post by yangcheng »

For people who use a personal notes tool like obsidian, how would you deal with notes that turned to work related later? I always find myself end up with half-finished notes in multiple different places. First versions in personal notebook and refined ones in company's google doc/etc. Thanks

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#489

Post by somishere »

somishere wrote: post #450

Just converted all my completely random unsaved (30+ permanently open) note taking tabs/windows from sublime into an obsidian document structure, synced to android with syncthing. Took about 10mins total. Love it. If anyone's interested ... two very (very) minor things I've noticed in my 20mins of usage (apologies if these are solved - I haven't got to the literature yet): - same-same appearance of sub-list markers (…

I should add, obsidian value add here is the android client which IMO needs a lot more focus due to input / storage considerations (constraints). If just syncing across desktops then sublime/similar with it's folder display would likely suit my needs.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#490

Post by gyrovagueGeist »

whimsicalism wrote: post #336
angryasian wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

theres a plugin for that - https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin

Unfortunately, I find the delay unacceptably high with this extension compared to first class support from apps like Goodnotes, Onenote and Apple Notes. Still love Obsidian - just wish drawing on it was a viable option.

Yep, Obsidian's latex support makes it almost ideal for writing math notes.. but because you can't quickly drop in quick sketches from a stylus (something like the Bear notes app.. which misses too many other features) it kills Obsidian for this usecase :(
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