Tasks are usually not very descriptive, but you get a sense of what's to come.
``` ServerBusyEgress is over the account limit. RequestId:ce64eac5-e01e-0071-6897-14c44e000000 Time:2022-12-20T17:22:50.8918472Z ```
In Taskpaper you can very quickly write out a detailed project with all kinds of sub tasks. Then when you’re finished you simply copy it and paste it into OmniFocus which automatically turns it into a full project. You get the best of both worlds with this; really quick project planning in the early stages and then the full capabilities of dedicated task management software for your day to day.
btw this plugin really reminds me of a piece of software that I had seen here sometime. An infinite zooming/nesting of notes was the main concept of it, does that ring a bell for anyone?
Very cool! I love Obsidian more every day.
Can also recommend the excellent app Pureref, which is an infinite canvas for pictures. Does not compete with this though, different use cases.
// I capture entire webpage into markdown then annotate markdown.
Excited to see it is JSON too! Cannot wait to try :)
Least they made a Linux client, good on em.
Edit. Read more, I get the clients now. Wow. Its so rare to see products think about not locking in.
It's grid based, low-fi, for visual ideas like wireframes.
The simplest thing for a HN audience is probably "put your vault in a git repo and push to github whenever you want to sync," though that isn't real-time.
https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1601664161360261120
https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1601664161360261120
And some longer walkthrough videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLBd_ADeKIw
It is okay because living in a sim brings peace to the NPCs. How can one or a group progress so smooth an idea.
Just one thing: how fast this app starts is a less of a blink.
Speechless. Congrats and i step down on my knees for this.
When Sony says: it's not a game -then this is: not a app in the ordinary way. Needs no praise or downvote. This is something completly different.
'Got to remind myself: breathe in - and breathe out.
my only issue with Figma is navigating through the screens once you create this gigantic canvas.
For example you can embed embed Markdown notes inside a Canvas, and embed a Canvas inside a Markdown note.
Similarly, right now they’re discussing how to contain a node-based database in human-readable markdown comments.
Also, I noticed that the flatpak version is currently outdated. Anyone know when that will get updated?
Logseq now has a whiteboard feature that is similarly powerful.
The thing is Obsidian vault is not represented by a recognizable file; it's a folder. So there is nothing to click at to automatically open it in Obsidian and consequently there is no way to create a shortcut on desktop that would open the specific Obsidian vault.
Yes, I know, I can launch Obsidian app and start from there but it is too much hustle when you have several frequently used vaults.
Also, the standard F2 shortcut for the usual item renaming does not work and it adds friction.
A Windows user would much better prefer to have a special anchor file in Obsidian vault folder that could be double-clicked and treated by the standard and observable means.
This is why .txt files are so popular. A double-click and they work. The specialized tools may be 100 times better, but they often miss one important detail: frictionless entry. If something causes friction, especially at the start, then it gradually becomes a burden a user doesn't want to deal with.
However, you advice solves the issue for me because I'm a technical user and you have kindly presented the information. But just imagine how many of those who would totally miss that.
Not sure how to do this on Windows any more, but on MacOS the trick is to use a Shortcut that captures your whatever (text input, image, web page converted to Markdown, file) and writes it into the appropriate vault and optional subfolder.
Can also capture to, e.g., Downloads folder, and have a cron move it to the vault. (I do this when capturing web pages so Browser can't write outside Downloads.)
Anything that can capture to a file path, can capture to Obsidian.
https://help.obsidian.md/Advanced+topics/Using+obsidian+URI
there is also a plugin for having advanced uris if you want to be more specific:
For reference the other is the ability to view and edit any regular text based file (i.e. .R / .cpp / .py) within the client rather than having to open a separate editor.
Must admit am super impressed at how much the team has achieved and how high quality everything is given how small the company is.
Though must admit, I do miss the ability to do literal space formatting of notes like I could do in onenote but that's more of a markdown / html limitation than a obsidian issue.
But this polished solution tops any of my expectations.
You've put so much effort in it - just wow! And perfectly presented.
We owe you something for this!
I figured that I've give this a spin but can't find it in my local install of Obsidian. I've got 'auto update' turned on (so I _think_ I'm up to date) and I can't find Canvas listed in the Core or Community plugins in the Settings panel within Obsidian. FWIW I'm using the "Commander" plugin to customize my left sidebar (so it might be hidden from me if it's supposed to show up automatically).
I must be missing something - how do I get access to this awesome and cool new feature? :)
Why on earth is the macOS download a 153 MiB ZIP file that expands into 363 MiB of stuff? Why does every Electron app have to come with its own copy of Electron? I miss the times when Windows came on seven 1.44 MB floppies and you did not even need all of them because they mostly contain drivers for hardware you didn't have. Actually I don't miss the time, swapping floppies was annoying.
But really, is the amount of space, bandwidth and clock cycles we carelessly waste really justified by the gain in productivity and achievable complexity?
Yes. Space, bandwidth, CPU cycles are cheap, especially for this sort of application. Developers are expensive.
As long as I don't end up with a single folder with hundreds of files, this seems interesting enough to check out.
The only real problem I have with markdown is that if I have editor soft-wraps, Vim doesn't work that well (I can't properly navigate soft-wrap lines, because there is a mismatch between what I see and what the editor understands as a line). If I do hard-wraps (new-lines), then the doc loses copy-paste portability to something like Docs.
Anyone know how to solve this?
As for copying to other formats, I stick to 80-character line length limit, so when I need to copy markdown text somewhere else I simply copy it from a rendered markdown document.
[0] https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Move_cursor_by_display_lines_whe...
I'd love to hear from anyone that has used infinite canvas in their workflow and found good use cases. Does it work well for teams collaborating on projects? I worry it could just turn into a more difficult to navigate wiki that's organized in a scatterbrained way--like it only makes sense to the person who made the most stuff in it.
Now I have to give it another go. This looks amazing.
The tabs and folder interface helps organizing those notes. But now when my notes are increasing OneNote don't offer a lot to organize these. Its bad at linking the notes too.
This looks a very good alternative with open specs. No other tool had this kind of canvas like OneNote before.
One question: It seems it could be troublesome to have to move / resize everything when adding a new card once a canvas is already quite busy. Is there something like auto-layout in the work, to handle these situations? (like to automatically re-layout cards and groups once adding a new item in between)
Emacs org-mode does demonstrate that it is possible to create a usable interface for text-mode tables.
But as much as I like markdown for its simplicity, tables are a major PITA, almost to the point of complete uselessness.
[1]: https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin
Your launcher app could also handle the creating of .obsidian files or (even better), write a plugin for obsidian to export a .obsidian file.
A couple hundred megabytes on a terabyte or larger harddrive? Who cares.
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 wasn't any pre-existing canvas-type format we could find that fit our priorities around longevity, readability, interoperability and extensibility.
The .canvas format is designed to be as easy to parse as possible. We've already seen a few plugins take advantage of it, and we hope that more tools will become available that can use the .canvas format.
Does this look OK? https://i.postimg.cc/4ymyHWxF/window-border.png
On the other hand, this has also caused some headaches around using it on mobile.. but so far this has been a worthwhile tradeoff. Thanks for all the hard work!
If you are transferring from desktop to mobile, make sure the .obsidian folder inside the vault is copied also
Obsidian sells a first party syncing solution, which I hear works well:
I do git syncing on Android via termux (It works most of the time, except when git decides to shit itself every now and then on my tablet):
https://forum.obsidian.md/t/guide-using-git-to-sync-your-obs...
I can't vouch for it because I don't have any iOS devices new enough to support it, but supposedly you can use Working Copy to sync via git on iOS:
https://forum.obsidian.md/t/mobile-setting-up-ios-git-based-...
Caveat: not an obsidian user (although I am a big step closer after this)
It can borrow a few things from OneNote e.g.
- cards resize automatically with text.
- OneNote starts with a cursor, clicking anywhere on canvas and writing is a single click operation.
- There are no hard borders around cards in OneNote.
- OneNote is WYSIWYG which this canvas isn't currently.
This is not a definitive list and I know its too early to ask for new features and stuff. Good things to consider IMO.
Not that this should impact Obsidian much, since I assume the canvas thing is optional there, just a data point.
Related to infinite canvas _do_ checkout “The Humane Environment” [1] it has a few interesting takes
As for a more semantic approach to layouting, I think Flying Logic[2] makes a decent job of it
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/344726.The_Humane_Int...
The MIT license is a license about copyrighted software, allowing people to use/modify/publish that software. But a file format isn't a piece of software.
Are you open-sourcing the specification document for the file format? (people are still free to write software that reads+writes the file format even if the specification document isn't open-sourced).
Are you open-sourcing your particular library for reading the file format? (I'm confused here, because you stressed that the file format was so simple, so I'd have expected it easy and maybe even desirable for many people to come up with libraries for reading+writing the file foramt?)
Anyone is free to write software that modifies a file - there is no copyright law protecting that. This is one of the reasons why many large corporations are pushing hard towards cloud - they can protect the format AND the platform then monetize it at will. End users lose control.
I will give them points for putting it in a readable file format. But placing it under an MIT license and "open sourcing" it, doesn't do anything - and they know that. It's just fluff to market their new features.
Edit: Re-reading what I posted, In case it's taken the wrong way, I am not disparaging the team at Obsidian in any way:
I think they do good work and make great software.
IANAL
> The file itself is considered instead to be an idea or a system and is therefore not protected by the laws of copyright. So the description of a file format is copyrightable, but the format as it exists in its medium is not.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_form...
If I sign up for the Sync or Publish plans, do I still need to pay $50 per year to use it at work? Or is that included?
Make a private repo, and git commit / push / pull your obsidian notes and canvases just like you would any other shared repo
Photoshop is proprietary software with a well documented file format anyone can read and write.
So is this software. "Open source" is not branding, it means something.
It's okay to make and promote and sell proprietary commercial software. That's what you are doing, be proud and clear about it. Pretending your efforts have anything to do with free software is deceptive.
Photoshop/PSD on the other hand is a closed proprietary format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_file_format
Obsidian on the other hand uses open formats with open standards. The difference is NIGHT and DAY.
And if the goal is taking freedom away from the people who are using your product, or to artificially keep people using your product because you know you are making the world a worst place to live in, making that type of propriety software is not OK, even though there are plenty of misguided organizations and people who do it.
I have files from the late 1980's that I can still read, but only with Libre Office because Apple's supplied apps can't read old MacWrite files.
Some people swear by OneNote or Notion or Keep or various mind mapping software, but keeping things cross platform and simple is a challenge. I was never an Evernote person, but it sounds like that turned into a bit of a debacle. These tools work for now, but will they work 5 or 10 years from now?
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 viewer, and that's what I currently use for most of these situations. But it doesn't help with having a simple way to see contents of all recently created notes.
Edit: this is something I mostly want for mobile
I wrote a very rough Python script to help me move my graph over to Obsidian - if anyone else is in the same boat, feel free to try it out https://github.com/NishantTharani/LogSeqToObsidian
Once you start getting into your notes you quickly run into common markdowns limitations and it's super simple stuff like centering images or adding captions. Then you choose to either flavor your markdown or use HTML and it's no longer common markdown.
I too am considering switching to Obsidian at least to see the difference wrt LogSeq as per my current note-taking approach.
I like Obsidian's community and development better but used LogSeq because of the outliner experience.
From reading the Obsidian website, they seem a tiny company. However, it is unclear where they are based and, therefore, what legal obligations they are operating under. What more, Obsidian has so far avoided the levels of compliance that allows for adoption by big businesses.
I love me some Obsidian but I'm mindful that, using their services, I just don't know how my data is being treated.
I realize vaults are encrypted locally. However, do we know that our vault secret isn't shared with Obsidian? Sure, it's (mostly?) an Electron app. But just how transparent and accountable is Obsidian about their operations?
For example, (future) plugins for advanced filtering and automatic layouts [2] will certainly help manipulate very large canvases.
[1] Most of it is online/collaborative (https://infinitecanvas.tools/gallery/) though so it is not exactly the same.
I won't forget why I, and many others, gave up Evernote. It did too much, not too little.
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.
One thing I immediately wanted was key commands and fast clicking to create cards like FigJam https://www.figma.com/figjam/ This is an amazing tool for brainstorming and collaborating during meetings.
It looks like we can't assign key commands for the canvas actions yet. That will make it much faster to work with.
Imagine: - C then click to place a card. This would go into text edit mode inside the card right away. (currently it gets snaggled up with VIM mode requiring me to go into insert) - I then click to place an image, then the asset search dialog opens - N then click to place a Note, then note search dialog opens
When you are brainstorming you want to add cards really quick. Deleting, moving, cloning should all be really immediate. I'm sure this can be easily achieved.
Thank you so much for Obsidian!
There is more room for innovation, as these "thinking spaces" are still inflexible and I expect to see more good things. Obsidian has huge advantage that is open and you are never scared to lose your work in somebody's walled garden.
To me, this is more important then any VR or anything like this as it helps us use computers to think and collaborate, augment our abilities. What were original reason for making computers, not just enslaving our attention in dopamine loop.
I've been using Gingko [1] for a long while now. The ever-expanding-but-hierarchical structure it uses hits a sweet spot for me.
But the spatial dimension really opens up other opportunities. For instance, I've been using the webviews to create workspaces for the various tasks I do - code review, writing/drafting documents.
Being able to drag and drop content from various places (including webviews) into the canvas feels magic.
With a few minor usability enhancements I'd probably be ready to call this my new favorite web browser!
But generally, it's an interface for expressing relationships between pieces of Obsidian content. Absent additional plugins, these relationships are user-defined, but they could easily be generated since they're pure JSON. Sky's the limit if you ask me. I'm excited to start writing a plugin that enhances the webviews a bit.
Use cases I have seen shared in the channel: family trees, storyboards, taxonomy, mind maps, workflow diagrams, roadmaps, research notes, project management, etc.
In my personal use of Canvas, I have been using it for planning house renovation project, developing a new baking recipe (with images of the various iterations).
It can also be used as a scratchpad alongside YouTube videos or web pages that you want to annotate.
Just incredible, and if anybody from Obsidian reads that, you have my utmost respect.
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.
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.
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.
Remember, most of Obsidian is just plugins. Even core functionality. Which is a big reason i use Obsidian.
I just wish that their sync service was less expensive, say $30, instead of $100. Because that’s the difference between being willing to pay for sync vs using any number of computer sync services (be a dropbox, Google Drive, or anything else) to get synchronization that is good enough that committing to either $10 a month or $100 a year just doesn’t seem worth it for the incremental gain.
I don’t know, it’s a difficult balance to strike between customers that need it enough to pay their current prices, and more casual users a bit on the borderline like me who are no power users enough to pay that much. Price elasticity is not an exact science and it’s entirely possible they have already filed in the optimum amount for it.
Although I wonder if there might be room for a tier that was quota driven. For example a certain amount of megabytes of data or number of notes or some other combination of factors, and charge around three dollars a month.
Basically I would like to give them more money to use their sink service, but I might be in too small of a user group for it to be worth it for them to try to target me and others like me with a specific type of plan.
A potential alternative revenue source is to produce enterprise features (like single sign on, or have vaults connected to corporate directories/departments). These features discriminate against casual users vs corporate users, who would tend to be able to afford a higher cost.
Obviously, a corporation would then want more, and different, features vs casual users. You end up developing the software biased towards one or the other, potentially fracturing the userbase. it's a double edged sword to play with.
Thank you from my heart. As a designer, I have visual thinking, which requires clear representation of relationships between information objects.
No more fiddling with mind-map apps which cannot offer this level of integration with my vault.
Now I finally have focused workflow.
Thank you again.
Whenever a product allows for end-user extension using actual code it always unlocks so much potential. Even if it’s just for the power users.
I think the following is an example of an intended use case? Can anyone confirm/deny?
For my work related notes, there's some hierarchical structure to them even though it's hard to see that at the note level. There's all the projects for my work, and then for each project there are notes, and sometimes those notes have notes, etc. I think what Canvas would do here is let me create a visual board for all of the notes related to my work that'd make it easier for me to visualize the whole, drill in/out in particular areas, etc? Does that sound right?
I've found AlternativeTo to be the complete opposite of shallow. In most cases its pretty precise in exhaustively listing every viable software alternative, which abundant filter options. Even if the ordering is "biased" (which I haven't really encountered), the site is quite useful without having many alternatives itself.
[1] https://logseq.com [2] https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/whiteboard
What doesn't work for me with these tools is that once I've gone deep I still need a tool that offers the absolute MINIMUM friction in its interface and for me nothing has conquered an A3 sheet and a box of coloured pencils.
Perhaps I should invest my time in really learning one of these tools but they never seem to be seamless enough to pose a real challenge to a pen and paper. Maybe if I had a Wacom tablet...?
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.
But true, a google keep like tile-view with auto-layout and filters would be a useful enhancement for obsidian.
Also, if you use a 3rd party storage solution instead of Obsidian Sync, you can view recently modified/created notes in the Recents on there.
If you wanted to see the content of all recent notes, you can write a custom query for the dataview extension that attempts it.
It was rejected by appstore for simplicity. But works well for me.
PS - all I can say about Canvas is 'wow'!!! Awesome feature!
I have two notes in there - Buffer and Shopping list. Buffer is one note for all the small stuff you mentioned. I also have widget on phone homescreen for that note so I can access it pretty seamlessly. Of course, it also means, you need to access some Nextcloud instance (I run my own).
Edit: I use Obsidian synced with Nextcloud for all the "second brain" things.
As others have already pointed out, Sync is not the only option to synchronize notes, Obsidian sync is just a convenience option.
For compliance, I am guessing you mean certs like SOC 2 / ISO 27001?, or what are you referencing? As we are a tiny company (6 people, not all full time) we just can't expense the time needed to get such a certificate.
> AES-256 is a military-grade encryption specification that's widely used in for example online banking.
The term “military grade” is meaningless and if anything raises a red flag (at least to me). What would be more useful is a detailed spec on the implementation.
Are the crypto routines implemented in house or has a well tested library been used? If in house, had there been an external code audit done? What were the results ?
You also do not need to trust Obsidian with any of your data. The files are local to your device so you can sync them however you want. If you don't want to use Obsidian Sync you can use Git, Dropbox, Syncthing, etc.
After much internal debate we chose the JSON format. We stay committed to keep it as open and easy to work with as possible. Plugin developers are already parsing and modifying the JSON file to programmatically change a Canvas view, and I think that's a fantastic start!
Now that you crossed that line, I hope the next "custom format" will be a "real" outliner. You are surely familiar with outliners ;-) It is about full block-level support really, and all what that allows (API, backlinks, query, aliases...)
Anyway, Canvas Rocks! Thanks!
You can see the spec for .canvas here: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-api/blob/master/canva...
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 mindmapping app), and I like having two separate spaces to sketch out ideas.
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.
But I do understand why you came up with that thinking, can't denied that a lot of us did fall into that pitfall of overcomplicating stuff.
Not sure whether this is true. Evernote did much, but on the wrongs parts, in the wrong ways, and then abounded them often in poor state. So in fact they did not enough on the important parts. They barely added the things people demanded, instead added features barely anyone asked for, or rewrote the clients for third or fourth time.
Obsidian on the other side has a sleak core, and everything else is in extensions. Even the core-app itself comes with most parts in extensions. While also allowing the users themselves to add extensions for their demand. This is significant more healthy than whatever evernote did.
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.
Obsidian devs have shown repeatedly that they understand why Obsidian is successful - just look at how they released this. No canvas-specific core software changes, just a new plugin that can be disabled.
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 use Obsidian to organize my notes about DIY, cooking, and gardening. For example, I store the recipes I found in a single place. It allows me to adjust them (as opposed to browser bookmarks) and write down my observations or experiments. Some concepts can be applied to multiple recipes, so linking them helps. Over time I memorize the concepts, but I struggle with remembering the ratios of ingredients. Having them written down is handy.
I used to have a local instance of MediaWiki a long time ago, but it was clunky. Then I moved to plaintext notes, which I used for many years. Easy to take, but lack of linking made reviewing them hard.
Localized markdown wiki (Obisdian) is a happy middle ground for me.
It can work well for technical topics that are not quickly outdated and usually have less transitory interpretations, but not as great for subjective things. If you want to have a consistency in your thinking, it can be helpful, but the value of that is also questionable. The last is more psychological, but if you keep getting distracted by a lot of thoughts, by putting them down there and being able to retrieve them when you want, it lets you focus more on things in the present without being distracted by them. If you are exploring a topic over a long span of time, and need to keep reorienting yourself back to the topic, it can be helpful.
or it could be that correlation doesnt imply causation.
People who have lots of ideas might just generally be better at ideation, have high intelligence, and perhaps also good at evaluating their ideas quickly. Their success is not _due_ to their jotting down of ideas, but that there is a confounding factor that influence both.
People who would copy the actions of successful people may just be cargo culting.
I guess maybe it would help as a presentation tool to show others how you visualize a project. I just hope it's worth the effort. Maybe the others you show it to will be impressed?
Some of my more visually-inclined friends use a similar program called Miro to keep track of their projects. At the conception stage they collect links to similar projects, scribble notes and draw sketches to create a moodboard. As the design takes form, they create some subsections in the canvas dedicated to certain details of the project and collect related notes there. Images or links of the work-in-progress are also pasted to track progress and to point out what needs to be changed. Each stage and each part of the project gets its own space with its own notes and when you zoom out you get a nice overview of the whole thing.
Miro can also be used collaboratively, so with groups you can also add in a Gantt chart and whatnot to organize.
My friends were in search of offline alternatives to Miro, so I think there is a group of people who will find this new feature very useful.
So far it has worked absolutely flawless. If I change a file it's changing on my connected device in seconds. Not exactly like working on a shared google doc but close enough that I would even use it as a hack to quickly share links between my mobile and my desktop
(I love my current job though!)
I think if your work already involves drawing flowcharts or diagrams of connected nodes, like in the biologist in the example, them it will make sense. If not, it will probably not be useful.
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.
> 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.
If this were just another pluigin that you could download and use if you want, I really wouldn't care. It's the fact that it's considered part of the core product that gives me bad vibes. It feels like the project, even without VC money, is doing what almost every other successful project does - expand.
Do you think Obsidian will ever be considered "done"?
There were two under-the-hood changes required to properly facilitate Canvas:
1. Redoing "embeds." We decided it was important for cards to work the same way our inline embeds work. So we rewrote the embed system to be properly extensible and useable by plugins. Canvas is leveraging the same system that powers ![[embeds]]
2. Untangling our editor. Previously, editors were a construct constrained to a markdown view in Obsidian. We've also done some refactoring so that a "editor" can be used anywhere, and doesn't need to be backed by a file. We see this a another big win for plugins that want to build their own editing experience
We want to keep pushing what third party plugins can do on top of Obsidian, so implementing a feature like Canvas forces us to find the limitations that exist in the API.
The question of whether Obsidian will ever be "done" is a tough one because operating systems and user expectations are a shifting landscape. Our intention is that the writing and thinking you do inside of Obsidian can be future-proof for decades, even if Obsidian itself is no longer relevant. That's why we're focused on portable formats like Markdown. However we cannot know how operating systems will change, and what will be required for Obsidian to continue working well on macOS 30 or Windows 20. Similarly, we can't close ourself off to new UI paradigms like Canvas that open up new thinking modalities our users are asking for. We hope that the modular and flexible architecture of the app allows it to remain very performant regardless of what plugins a user has turned on.
{
"nodes":[
{"id":"6c711bf8c24c4f5b","x":-226,"y":-62,"width":400,"height":400,"type":"file","file":"testin/2022-10-14.md"},
{"id":"4dd7d04cdd0b379c","x":-530,"y":-209,"width":250,"height":60,"type":"text","text":"this is a note"}
],
"edges":[
{"id":"0c589a4d6bbb06aa","fromNode":"4dd7d04cdd0b379c","fromSide":"bottom","toNode":"6c711bf8c24c4f5b","toSide":"left"},
{"id":"eda9f3edb3ec232a","fromNode":"6c711bf8c24c4f5b","fromSide":"top","toNode":"4dd7d04cdd0b379c","toSide":"right"},
{"id":"abf404722ba48c3b","fromNode":"4dd7d04cdd0b379c","fromSide":"top","toNode":"6c711bf8c24c4f5b","toSide":"right"}
]
}
I was reading the plug-in development documentation [0] this morning and the ways in which you can extend Obsidian feels relatively limited. I hope they’ll add more things to hook into.
0: https://marcus.se.net/obsidian-plugin-docs/user-interface
> The Canvas format is MIT licensed in the same way that Markdown uses a BSD-type license.
In no sense are these two things comparable. "Markdown uses a BSD-type license" is a true statement because "Markdown", in the context where it makes sense to say this, is a Perl script—a program, licensed in a way that is not uncommon for open source programs to be licensed. Your canvas format is not a program. It's a 70-line TypeScript interface definition, going by your own link:
<https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-api/blob/master/canva...>
To call this "open source" (let alone open source "in the same way that Markdown" is) is a very odd choice. It's less odd for anyone who recognizes that it follows a common pattern, where folks with something to sell often openwash what it is that they're selling based on the (not unfounded) perception that having it be thought of as more open than it really is tends to confer certain positive benefits. It's why Steve Jobs lied about FaceTime being an open standard, for example.
Whether or not you're giving any explicit permission to build apps, scripts, plugins, etc. is largely moot—to be frank, you don't have the power to dictate otherwise. On the other hand, if you're saying that you're aiming to steward and participate in what (you hope) turns out to be a vibrant ecosystem built on a common format, then that's cool. But say what you mean, though. Calling it an open format or an open standard would be fine; "open source", however, this is not.
> Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.
What we have done so far is shared an open spec for the .canvas file format, with a type definition that helps developers understand how to create properly formed Canvas files. We also are giving permission to people/companies to use this format with the freedoms that come with the MIT license. In addition we're also putting forward the intention that there should be a free and open format for this type of canvas data, with some similar properties to Markdown. Perhaps in the future there will be more open source tooling fitting into definition (2).
The goal here is simply to help people feel more comfortable that the canvas files they create are their own, and can eventually accrue longevity as more tools get built around the format. I hope this will lead to a rich ecosystem outside of Obsidian. We're committing to keeping it an open format, and hope to collaborate with other people who might want to adopt it.
The same can't be said about the PSD format, so I do think there is a difference in the level of openness that we're aiming for.
[0]: https://pandoc.org/
That's against their license. You're essentially pirating it.
I know the plugin, but it seems to work only for Github hosted repos. I want my notes to be elsewhere.
> what do you think is more likely, that the tiny team of 6 invested a ton of time reinventing the wheel with a custom in-house AES implementation
AES is a cryptographic primitive. No one ever implements their own. What developers implement is the cryptographic system - the block cipher mode, initialisation vectors, rounds, salting etc. It all very easy to get this wrong. Their site does state they use GCM cipher mode which is the right choice (say over ECB, CBC…)
> which you can verify with wireshark
Viewing encrypted material in a packet capture is meaningless and provides zero assurances
> What exactly are your concerns, given that the data isn't encrypted locally in the first place?
The encrypted data in their cloud solution is adequately protected.
Companies that take end to end encryption seriously will generally provide details on how they went about their cryptographic system.
For example, is the encryption key derived from the password? If so what is the key derivation function? How many rounds didn’t get select? These are generally the responsibility of the developer to responsibly choose.
I'm not an obsidian user or familiar with the code base, so could be wrong here.
The data is probably encrypted with AES before being sent (the E2E bit), though probably there is some metadata unencrypted.
When the data is actually sent, the entire thing would likely be encrypted again with TLS while it is in transit. This means, for example, your ISP cannot see the unencrypted metadata or the encrypted data.
So if you open a capture in wireshark then you would likely see this. Of course it is possible to decrypt the TLS to check the underlying data is encrypted, but it is not trivial for most people.
An easier way to see what it is doing may be to run ltrace on it and check what it is writing to the sockets. Or gdb, break on the SSL write function and inspect the registers to see what is being written.
e.g. gdb --args wget "https://www.google.com"
b SSL_write
r
x/s $rsi
> "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.google.com\r\nUser-Agent: Wget/1.21.3\r\nAccept: */*\r\nAccept-Encoding: identity\r\nConnection: Keep-Alive\r\n\r\n"
For example they could use a super secure key, or the "1234" for everyone, just looking at the data probably wouldn't tell you this.
We also had someone from the EteSync/EteBase project take a look at the code before Obsidian Sync was released.
> Warning: This API provides a number of low-level cryptographic primitives. It's very easy to misuse them, and the pitfalls involved can be very subtle. Even assuming you use the basic cryptographic functions correctly, secure key management and overall security system design are extremely hard to get right, and are generally the domain of specialist security experts.
Errors in security system design and implementation can make the security of the system completely ineffective.
Given the potential volume of people's personal data that might be stored, this is certainly an area you would want to get right.
Syncing by merging changes and resolving possible conflicts is a much harder task. Theoretically git has all the right bits, including the pluggable diffing and merging. In practice, I haven't seen it seriously used in this capacity.
This is to say nothing about files you only want on one node but not on another (heavy stuff lives on server and laptop, but not mobile, etc.)
This is why special-case syncing tools that know how to sync semantically are indispensable.
What do you mean? What is preventing you from using git to sync your notes?
And it has 15 GB free forever, just like Google Drive.
Mega sync has native clients in MacOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android.
Please, we don’t need to have the electron rant every single time an app that uses it is discussed.
> 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 Apple Notes than Obsidian).
Yes there are UI elements at play here. But even UI elements are dependent on the language and framework you have decided to use. For example, it is common on Android to use an expanding sidebar whereas on iOS it is more common to use a dropdown menu. If you are developing a one size fits all app then design choices that feel native on one platform are going to feel non-native on another.
And in addition, physical app speed matters. If you want to create a brand new note and you're not already in the app it takes significantly more time until you can start typing with Obsidian than if you use Apple Notes, 1Writer etc. If you're doing it multiple times a day this time adds up.
If you don't think physical app speed matters then why do you think big companies spend thousands optimising webpages to reduce latency? It is because the consumer gets bored of waiting and goes elsewhere. If another app comes along that offers the same functionality of Obsidian but is noticeably faster, people will migrate to it. Everything is a tradeoff, but pretending framework performance isn't a relevant factor does not help anybody.
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.
I'm not declaring anything. I gave my interpretation of the intended meaning, which didn't mention speed or electron at all. Thus, there were two options:
- My interpretation was correct, and it was _the exact same rant every electron app thread ever has_
- Your interpretation was correct, and it was _the exact same rant every electron app thread ever has_
As it happens - it was the first.
The electron rant is about as useful an opinion as the "Python 2 to python 3 migration was botched" that is brought up in every single thread about python.
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.
GWT still exists and had a release last year. It’s been 9 years since it fully transitioned to an open source project. I’m not sure at what point Google stopped contributing since I see old team members in the commit history.
- Obsidian Sync is pretty slow.
- Obsidian Sync doesn't happen in the background, at present. That means, if you just made a bunch of updates in Obsidian, or you haven't opened the Obsidian mobile app in a while, you're in for a wait.
- Obsidian Sync occasionally has sync errors that involve manual interaction.
That said, it's fine and the overall Obsidian experience makes it worth it (well, if you can swing a discounted price).
More realistically, I used to use a custom sync setup with a WebDAV server I set up and Goodsync software. You can set it to sync in file change, and it was fast, with changes replicating in a few seconds.
As it is, the Obsidian sync takes a few minutes. And if you edit the file on another device before sync goes through, you’ll lose the changes from one device or the other.
I don't think that's the intended use case of Sync or anything they've ever said it could be used for.
[0] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/content...
But you can always tweak settings to run the 3rd party sync app always in the baclground, and override the battery optimization setting for that particular app.
EDIT: Roadmap updated, so we're on the same page :)
Good catch though! Thanks
Edit: The roadmap has been updated: https://scrybble.ink/roadmap
Just because you know about electron and its performance issues doesn’t mean everyone who is reading this thread does. There may be many people using who don’t even know what electron is or that Obsidian is an electron app and may find the information informative. Last time I checked, this site was for everybody. Or is it only for you and your superior knowledge, oh mighty one?
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.
The thing is that you should not expect a user to explicitly host a git repo somewhere to for a grocery list app. Most apps are designed for users who are unwilling to do that, and are actually ready to pay to avoid whatever technical hurdles.
OTOH I see a niche for an app geared towards more technical users, chich would, among other things, allow you to point at a git / hg / whatever repo to use as the synchronization point.
Clearly we have had very different experiences. I have mainly markdown notes, PDFs, and screenshots and it syncs everything continuously as I work. As for "losing" the changes, I'll have to push back on that. You have full version history, so while you might have to look at an old version, you won't lose anything. There's certainly nothing unique to Obsidian with respect to conflict resolution. If version history isn't working, you'll have to talk to the developers because there's a serious bug.
This has been my biggest fear using sync. So far I haven't had any issues, but I just get a" feeling" (maybe it's the lag between syncs) that this could definitely happen.
Can you explain in a little more detail how it might actually occur? Maybe so I can prevent it from happening.