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!
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.
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?)
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?
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.
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?
[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...?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I won't forget why I, and many others, gave up Evernote. It did too much, not too little.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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 ```
