In case you missed it, Obsidian’s been enjoying some major updates in the past month or two. Here’s a few bits that I think would especially interest the MPU crowd.
New look and feel
Kepano, the developer behind the most popular Obsidian theme, was hired to design a new default theme that is crisp and clean as a part of the 0.16 release (currently in Insider, available to the public soon). These changes will also make it easier for community theme designers to change things in the app.
The team has been hard at work enabling native features across different OSes. Mac users can now enjoy native context menus, access to Services (and the macOS Share Sheet) via the menubar, and a suite of new Menu options. The app even now refers to Finder instead of the previously-generic “system explorer”!
It’s now possible to open multiple windows for the same Obsidian vault. (These are effectively “pop out” windows — there’s still only one main vault window.) The extra windows can display multiple layouts and use tabs just like the main app.
I really love the development speed and feedback/open culture around Obsidian.
Literally the only thing that could make me love it more, is if the company started hiring OSS-contributers in the community like they did here
I’d be tempted if I thought that the new share sheet feature in Obsidian could send tasks to Reminders with the Obsidian callback URL, but I doubt it. This is one of the main reasons I abandoned Obsidian.
The tab paradigm feels comfy. But as I’ve got used to quickly switching between documents in different panes via keyboard shortcuts (while still maintaining the visibility of the previous pane for reference), now I’m considering how can I set keyboard shortcuts to:
Move a tab to a new split
Move a tab across existing splits
Open a link as a new tab in the split to the right/left
Turn a split into a tab in the split to the right/left
iCloud or any other cloud service works for syn across laptops and mobile apps. Obsidian is one of the best free note taking app. Especially for power users. I’ve seen apps with 20% the features that charge subscription. Just my two cents.
I had sooo many problems with sync over iCloud
Honestly I would rather try to avoid syncing, and just storing it on iCloud so you still have access to the files when you need them - editing them as plain text.
In the end I went with paid sync, and all my problems went away.
I agreed, this is exactly the same reason I went for Obsidian Sync. It is fast and painless, cross platform too. Not sure why they can do that but Apple the biggest company in the world cannot
Homogenous data. If you know what your data looks like ahead of time, this kind of thing is easy. iCloud has to handle all kinds of data, not just files.
I have backed away from iCloud Drive in order to reduce my frustrations. But Apple’s CloudKit syncing of the NotePlan app between my Mac and my iPhone has been fine. NotePlan very occasionally puts up a dialog that the CloudKit server could not be reached but then a moment later my data is synced.
With iCloud Drive I was at the mercy of Apple’s generic, it-will-get-there-eventually, approach.
With NotePlan and CloudKit, I feel like the app developer has made a well-thought out and carefully implemented sync system.
I am excited for the addition of tabs. The new design is looking nice!
Re: iCloud Drive sync and Obsidian, it works 90% of the time for me. Sometimes I have to wait 10-15s for Obsidian on iOS to sync on startup, and I’ve noticed most iCloud services don’t work well when I use a VPN. But I can’t be bothered to add another subscription, especially after cutting back on subs recently.
That’s a very good looking update - a huge improvement and a much more pleasant environment. The menus are much improved.
I think you’re right.
It would also be nice to be able to quickly share a whole page to Reminders, but sharing a document from a vault to Reminders shares a file:// link, rather than an obsidian:// link. If nothing else the file:// link isn’t cross platform so it’s not particularly useful. It’s possibly a limitation of MacOS?
At least the Obsidian URL is easy to get, and it’s no worse than UpNote.
Eduard is great, and even has the cojones to run a subreddit for NotePlan. I also like his feature voting system, where features that get upvoted are the first to be considered for implementation.
