I’ve been on Craft for weeks now but this is going to make me take another look at Obsidian:
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Yeah, I’ve been using Obsidian for maybe three weeks and I’m doing most of my editing on 1Writer or Taio and syncing to Obsidian. I spend more time in those text editors though. Really enjoying the simplicity of Markdown and cross linking files.
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Advantage to using Taio over 1Writer?
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These apps will determine whether I stick with Obsidian or jump ship to Craft. I’m really hoping that they are good. “Lightweight for viewing and capture” could be usable and work well, or could be like the original Devonthink iOS app.
I really wish they would consider putting the full app on iPad.
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At the moment I’m comparing. I’m a fan of iA Writer and have been using that for a few years. When I started with Obsidian I bought 1Writer for the active, tapable links, full text search, tag support. It seems like a natural companion to Obsidian for folk using an iPad or iPhone. Taio has some interesting features including a built in clipboard manager and it’s own scripting/shortcuts system. I’m not sure if I’ll use either of those but thought I’d give it a try to compare. Also, Taio uses a tabbed interface for opening multiple files and file previews. Different, not necessarily better. Also, the Taio sidebar showing files is persistent unless one chooses full screen in the editor. I prefer this to 1Writer which is full screen all the time and which requires a swipe to view files. Taio also has a much larger selection of export options. Both apps are similar but there are definitely some differences worth evaluating. Currently Taio is in “early stages of development”, so no cost. Final version will have a free version and a paid version for more advanced features. At the moment I’m leaning towards Taio.
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Does Taoi support wikilinks? Seems like that’s essential in an Obsidian companion.
It does, but it was a little glitchy when I tried it a week ago. They are updating weekly, it seems, so I’ve been meaning to go back to it…
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Do you have to set up your vault in iCloud Drive for Taio to really work? I am still on Dropbox but considering migrating (by which I mean…moving the folder. Plaintext is great!)
The latest Taio update allows wikilinks with file bookmarks, so e.g., Working Copy works too. Can’t add folders from other sync services though.
FYI, it looks like Taio wikilinks depend on relative paths, so you’ll get links that look like [[some folder/your file.md]].
Okay, so lately I’ve found myself using Tinderbox, Roam, and Obsidian all at the same time and so I thought I’d share about it:
I’ve been coding some data in Tinderbox, which has worked really well in a number of ways, but fell apart when I tried to visualize the links between my notes (I believe they’re working on this rn):
Thanks to Tinderbox’s robust export mechanism, I was able to get my data out of Tinderbox and into Obsidian for better exploratory visualization:
I use Obsidian to explore the data and then once I stumble upon something interesting, I verify/map it in Tinderbox:
All the while, I record my notes on the process in Roam:
So yeah, didn’t expect to be using all three of these tools at the same time, but I’m finding there to be very little overlap between them for the things I currently need.
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Impressive. I may have to not forget about Taio! It’s almost like Drafts, but the ability to open outside documents. Definitely could replace 1Writer and/or iA Writer for many.
That is inspiring, @beck! May we ask how you exported from Tinderbox to Obsidian? I can think of several ways to do it (as is typical), but curious how you did it! Oooh, in fact, that idea alone gives me some crazy ideas.
Basically there are two ways I figured to do it, which you pick would depend on the nature of the notes you’re exporting.
The most obvious is to export your TB file as Markdown (through manipulating the “HTML Template” or just creating your own template and assigning that as an attribute) and use Finder to batch rename .html to .md.
The second way is more complicated, but I had to do it because my note names were very long. I used ^action^ code to create bulleted lists of the notes I wanted to export in Tinderbox. This give me several very long bulleted lists in the “Preview” tab (like > 1000 bullets). I copied and pasted them into Roam and then exported the out of Roam as .md. This allowed me to retain the super long file names, which was important because they’re quotes from people. Obsidian (or maybe Mac OS?) runs into issues creating file names that are that long, so they don’t get created, but the linkages remain in those long lists, so Obsidian just grays out those pages that don’t exist in the vault yet. You can see it here with two at the bottom, but I can still mostly traverse the graph as I want to.
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I wonder if it would work better in Obsidian to use the relatively new aliases feature for the super long name? This is, ironically, a (rare?) situation in which the ZettelID concept could actually be helpful!
Super interesting though!
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Thank you for sharing all of this! I came here tonight because I’m thinking about the best way to structure my client work, files, and tasks. I’m currently using:
Craft: Call notes, ideation thoughts, etc.
Omnifocus: Client, internal, and personal tasks
Fantastical: All my appointments, and sometimes tasks dropped in from Omnifocus
GSuite: All client folders in Drive, Sheets, Docs, and Slides for client-facing stuff
Things are just feeling all over the place, and I’m constantly chasing my work as opposed to managing it. I’ve never tried DEVONThink, though not sure it would help here, or just be another tool in the box.
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Have you ever tried Taskade? I’ve been using it now and I really like how simple and powerful it is. I think it’s the best alternative to notion, obsidian, evernote and similar tools.
Say more? Perhaps even share a workflow you use with the app, as is the theme of this thread? It kind of feels like you’re just dropping links to advertise for Taskade. Perhaps because you work for a startup marketing firm. 
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