Obsidian for thinking and knowledge management

Software
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Thanks for the compliment. However, I have a pretty pronounced vocal dysphonia, so public speaking is not going to be happening.

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I appreciate this for many reasons, but possibly mostly because I thought my setup was overly intricate, but now I see that there are heights I haven’t yet reached.

@MitchWagner/@anon85228692—Obsidian-in-DT is what I do, too. I use DT’s item links to point to e.g., working slidedecks and key PDFs so that I can jump to them easily. Everything markdown gets linked with [[wikilinks]]. It has been pretty robust for the past month or two!

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I’d love to learn more about your setup, if you have the time and inclination to write at some length about it, or even do a screencast. If you’ve already done such a thing and can point me to it, I’d be grateful.

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Hey @ryanjamurphy, how is that compared to regular file:// links?

Thanks for the great work you’ve doing in Obsidian Forum, btw.

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I’m not @ryanjamurphy but I think the answer to your question is that DT’s item links point uniquely and permanently to that particular document.

A file:// link will break if you move the file, and it won’t work on other computers or on your iPhone or iPad. DevonThink links work in all those situations. If you click a DevonThink link on your desktop, it opens the document it points to. Same on your iPhone/iPad, same on other Macs, and it continues to work if you move the document to another folder (which are called Groups in DevonThink).

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@MitchWagner Thanks! It really is nothing special, but I am planning on it.

@ldebritto file:/// links are effectively the same—unless you move the file you’re pointing to, or try to open them on a different device, then they break. I can open DT item links on any device and after moving the …

See Mitch’s answer, ha!

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So just to make sure – and to define my best practices – you put “heavy” documents (PDFs and media) in DT, right? With deep linking? And keep Obs for just notes? I have been thinking about doing that (allowing Obs to stay nimble, only putting media attachments in there).

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Yep. I don’t even put media in there. But, I rarely use images in my work/notes.

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Awesome, that’s what I had thought would be most sensible initially. Thanks a lot!

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Thanks, @MitchWagner! That was very clear.

Currently, I’m WFH so always on the same machine. When the time comes to get back at the office, those linking features will be very handy.

As I can remember DT allows to both (a) direct import and (b) index files into its bases.

Will those links work also with indexed files or just the imported ones?

I ask because I by and large rely on files that exist and are being constantly modified on shared folders and would need those files to be indexed instead of imported.

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There is no difference between an internal (imported) file or an indexed file in a DEVONthink database, as far as the file is concerned. Many user have indexed-only databases.

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Thanks, @MitchWagner! That was very clear.

You’re welcome!

Currently, I’m WFH so always on the same machine. When the time comes to get back at the office, those linking features will be very handy.

WFH here too – and always have been – but pre-COVID I traveled an average of five days per month, and looked for solutions that worked across my Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Now, my work tends to be Mac-only.

During the first weeks of the pandemic, I continued to look for cross-Apple-platform solutions, but when it became apparent this was going to go on for a while, I focused on Mac-only productivity.

How that pertains to Obsidian: It does not now work on the iPad or iPhone, and although there are workarounds, they seem clumsy to me. Previously that would have been a dealbreaker for me, but now I’m not worried about it. By the time I’m back on planes, maybe Obsidian for iPad/iPhone will be available. Or maybe I will have moved on to something else.

Will those links work also with indexed files or just the imported ones?

Depends on what you mean. To use Obsidian in conjunction with DevonThink, you should leave your Obsidian documents outside of DevonThink, and index them rather than import them.

But once you’ve indexed them they will look to DevonThink as if they were internal documents living inside DT’s own database, for almost all useful purposes. Keyword: Almost.

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could you please share the script for “getting current weather” part of the daily note?

I was trying to find how can I get current weather, I was thinking with http://wttr.in/?FT1q, but canot find the correct implementation

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This is just one approach. To set this up, you need a site, like a newspaper, that provides an RSS weather feed as stories. Thus the items 1 through 10 below. (Doesn’t need to be 10 – could be any number in range.)

Some national services have sites like this. So, for example, taking a newspaper at random (this is not my own) here is an example:

on getWX()
	set myWX to {}
	tell application id "DNtp"
		try
			set myWXdisplay to ""
			set getWXsource to download markup from "http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/rss_capital-weather-gang"
			
			set getWX to items 1 through 10 of (get items of feed getWXsource)
			repeat with theItems in getWX
				set myWXdisplay to myWXdisplay & "- [" & (title of theItems) & "](" & (guid of theItems) & ")" & return
				
			end repeat
		end try
		return myWXdisplay
	end tell
end getWX

This merely returns a string of article links in markdown format.

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Any of you lucky people with access to the iOS alpha want to comment on how usable it is? Does it support the plugins?

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It’s effectively the desktop app on iPhone/iPad.

Lots of little things to polish as yet, but it’s only version 0.0.12 so far.

And yes, plugin and theme support seems to be there almost in full. Some plugins depend on things only possible on the desktop (e.g., calling shell scripts). (Anyone know if Apple will care about this more after the TestFlight, or are we in the clear on that front…?)

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Apple might potentially have issues but they’ve been allowing a lot of apps with arbitrary code execution into the App Store for a while now (Pythonista) and pretty extensive JavaScript specific stuff more recently (Scriptable, JSBox, Taio).

Taio has actually been what I’ve been using for my main mobile app for a while and could be competitor down the road as it matures and adds Mac support. It handles a lot of things perfectly already like Mermaid support, recursive linking and Mark Map but lacks some important parts like backlinks, tags and regex searching for now. I’m excited enough about it I bought the lifetime license as soon as pricing arrived.

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Apple vets TestFlight releases – so, for now, we can assume Apple is OK with the plugins.

@Shruggie – I have a feeling everyone will get their hands on the mobile app soon. Echoing what @ryanjamurphy says, I find it very stable and trustworthy. I’ve moved one of my “production” project vaults into the CloudKit folder for Obsidian sync. I also have had good experience with CloudKit sync in other contexts.

The Obsidian mobile app is a case of underpromise and way over-deliver. Erica and Shida deserve a lot of credit for the way they’ve managed this software delivery on all platforms. A lot of developers dither for years about “maybe I can, maybe I can’t” when asked about mobile versions of Mac apps. The Obsidian duo’s attitude is “we can; we will; we did”.

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Yeah, they are seriously impressive, it’s astounding how quickly they’ve managed to go from an Electron app to native for iOS.

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